The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has launched a new cloud capability available outside of the contiguous United States and is on the cusp of releasing further cloud capabilities, according to a DISA official.
Korie Seville, the technical director for DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC), said that OCONUS Region for Stratus is now operational at the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, marking a step forward in the agency’s work to establish a global cloud infrastructure.
“We’ve deployed the implementation of our Stratus environment in Hawaii … and we are quickly looking at other sites and other combatant commands to be able to extend our Stratus solution into,” Seville said.
OCONUS Region for Stratus is just one element in DISA’s plan to bring OCONUS Cloud to the Department of Defense (DoD). According to Seville, these cloud capabilities aim to create a global fabric that will connect on-the-ground teams, to headquarters, and private and public cloud networks.
DISA is also at the cusp of releasing what it’s calling OCONUS Beta, Seville said. Customers interested in participating in the beta program for OCONUS Region for Stratus may email the Hybrid Cloud Broker.
“We’re looking for customers that have existing workload either on premises at their facilities or may be hosted in the DISA facilities in Hawaii or others that are looking for a way to dip their toe into the cloud,” Seville said.
He added that the agency would also consider customers who have existing offerings in OCONUS Stratus Regions and “would like to create an OCONUS web or create some sort of data synchronization or data transfer between OCONUS and OCONUS facilities inside of the Stratus platform.”
“We have also been working with our customers across the combatant commands, as well as with others that have OCONUS needs to better understand what they need and where they need those things developed,” Seville said.
In addition, DISA HaCC is partnering with the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) and U.S. Special Operations Command to launch the Joint Operational Edge (JOE) initiative, which is a commercial cloud OCONUS offering which DISA is also currently looking to pilot in Hawaii.
JOE is an interconnected network of large form factor edge computing systems designed to provide Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and other enterprise service offerings across the DoD. Cloud offerings under the JOE initiative can be procured through the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.
“There’s a lot of different OCONUS efforts that are underway, which is exciting because we started talking about OCONUS cloud last year we are just on the cusp of delivering some of these pilots and just ready to take things off the whiteboard and putting them to use,” Seville said.
In other cloud news, Seville provided some updates on the department’s JWCC program.
“After we announced the JWCC award we’ve been actively bringing on task orders with customers, so our customers have been purchasing cloud through JWCC. We’ve seen the JWCC program continue to mature, and we’ve continued to outreach customers and work with our partners within the department and the Federal government at large,” Seville said.
Most recently, DoD CIO John Sherman recently released a memo calling for military departments and other DoD entities to leverage the JWCC contract to purchase future enterprise-wide cloud service offerings across all classification levels as part of a push to rationalize cloud adoption across the department.
