The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) confirmed today that it plans to sunset its milCloud 2.0 cloud services contract by May 2022, but offered little in the way of firm detail on how it plans to migrate to comparable services the existing customer roster of milCloud 2.0, which is managed for DISA by General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT).
As of earlier this year, milCloud 2.0 was running more than 4,000 workloads for nearly 90 defense-agency customers.
“The milCloud 2.0 contract is projected to sunset May 20, 2022,” DISA confirmed in a statement to MeriTalk. At the same time, the agency pledged to “work closely with existing milCloud 2.0 users to mitigate impacts to mission and support migrations on that timeline,” and before the May 20 sunset date for the cloud environment.
“We will work closely with existing milCloud 2.0 users to mitigate impacts to mission and support migrations whether to commercial cloud or another environment,” DISA said. The agency did not identify any of those potential successor environments or commercial cloud providers.
“Once the contract expires, the environment will shut down, so there can be no waivers to the published timelines,” DISA warned.
GDIT said in a statement that it “successfully executed the milCloud 2.0 program and met all contractual requirements.” It continued, “We continuously enhanced milCloud 2.0 with new capabilities and delivered on-premise and general-purpose cloud services to meet demand and advances in technology.”
The company pledged to “continue to support customers currently leveraging milCloud 2.0 and stands ready to partner with the Department of Defense as they continue to evolve their enterprise cloud strategy.”
Since DoD canceled its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) single-vendor cloud services contract in July after nearly three years of wheel-spinning over contract protests, the Pentagon has since turned its attention to the proposed multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).
Last month, DoD invited four major cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle – to bid on the JWCC contract.
Danielle Metz, deputy DoD CIO for information enterprise, said in October that DoD had completed the market research phase for the JWCC contract, and said the two-month effort was spurred by “the sense of urgency from our combat commanders.”
She forecast that DoD expected to decide by late October which companies would be allowed to participate, and once the agency issued JWCC contract solicitations, it planned to make contract awards by April 2022.
It remains unknown whether current users of milCloud 2.0 services will be steered toward services under the JWCC contract, but DoD’s projected date for JWCC contract awards might make it a tight window to hit for organizations that will not be able to use milCloud 2.0 beyond May 20 of next year.
