Cloud computing is in full swing at various agencies and military branches across the government according to various cloud experts.
At the Federal Executive Forum hosted by Federal News Network, various government officials detailed their respective agency’s successes and direction with cloud. The first to detail their agency’s cloud journey was Paul Puckett, enterprise director for the Cloud Management Agency (CMA) at the Army.
Puckett outlined how the Army has been working since last year on its cloud platform, cARMY.
“We’ve done a number of things in the last three years, most notably, with the stand up of cARMY we pushed for… a multi-tenant secure environment in which essentially, any customer the United States Army can deploy their system into the cloud, because before cARMY, everyone just kind of did it on their own. And so that’s been live now for two and a half years,” stated Puckett.
“Now over 150 systems are working through the process of the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA) process, just about to hit 100 customers that are building and are also operational and live within the environment itself,” stated Puckett.
Another government agency that has made serious strides to implement cloud technology to achieve its agency’s mission has been U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Shane Barney, chief information security officer, at USCIS explained some of the struggles that the agency has gone through that have since made the agency work more efficiently to meet its cloud needs.
“At USCIS, we jumped into the cloud feet first, hardly even looking at what we were doing over 10 years ago now. We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. stated Barney.
“Now I look at our enterprise, we’re probably 95 percent cloud-based probably maybe even more you know, we are in different cloud environments now. We’re three different cloud environments at this point. So we’ve seen the utility, the value of it, all of our major business applications are cloud-based,” he said.
At the same department of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Dr. Mark Lucas director of Cloud Computing Operations at DHS explained a wider aspect of what the department has been up to when it comes to cloud technology.
“One of the things we’re excited about here at Homeland Security is our cloud security gateway solution. We did a proof of concept early this year for a solution that not only helped us implement zero trust but and micro-segmentation of architectures, but it also allows us to gain visibility across our hybrid compute environment,” said Dr. Lucas
Lastly, Louis Koplin, deputy chief technology officer at the Navy detailed, how the Navy has been focused on changing the culture of the cloud to make the transition to new technologies more cohesive.
“We’ve been focusing on that culture problem at the DoD CIO level. And just in September, Aaron Weisner, CIO signed out a capstone design concept for information superiority. We have an information superiority vision that the Secretary of the Navy signed and this says, culturally speaking, how are we going to shift the way we think about developing solutions to realize information superiority,” stated Koplin.
