Officials from General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) and VMware recently detailed key advantages of the integration of VMware’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technology into the milCloud 2.0 environment that GDIT manages for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).
The VMware integration project announced for milCloud 2.0 last November is driven by the reality that the vast majority of Defense Department (DoD) agencies already use VMware IaaS technology. That makes milCloud 2.0 a natural fit for DoD agencies to leverage their existing VMware footprint in the milCloud 2.0 cloud environment.
Brian Whitenight, partner director of milCloud 2.0 at GDIT, said during the March 11 webinar that the VMware integration meets three key value tenets – “it’s secure, it’s easy to use, and it’s affordable.”
Historically, Whitenight said, cloud services have been “extremely tough for DoD to take advantage of” due to concerns about security, the requirement to refactor workloads and reference architectures, and the perils of acquisition processes, which he said “can be very lengthy.”
But with the integration of VMware into milCloud 2.0, “we brought all of those pieces together to make them much easier,” he said.
On the security front, milCloud 2.0 infrastructure operates within the DoD Information Network (DoDIN) physical facilities and network boundaries, and enjoys a FedRAMP High Impact Level 5 certification. And for ease of use, milCloud 2.0 is pre-competed and pre-approved – meaning a mission partner can use a credit card to procure cloud service in as little as 48 hours, Whitenight said.
With pricing, he said, “there is no up and down and changing of fees and service charges for the lifetime of your deployment in the cloud.”
“These are really the exact same tenets” that VMware talks about building with DoD clients on premises, said Bill Rowan, vice president of Federal at VMware, who also spoke on the webinar organized by MeriTalk, GDIT, VMware, and Carahsoft.
“All that we are doing is taking the same type of technologies … and offering them back as a service” within “that cloud environment that many have lacked,” Rowan said. “What we have really been allowed to do is to take that solution set … and do that now as a cloud service with the partnership of GDIT and DISA.”
“It really is a win-win for customers,” Rowan said. “We are really at the right place at the right time with the right type of solution.”
For the full story, access the complimentary webinar.
