The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is charting its next steps with plans over the next two years including a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), refining program budgeting and execution, and undertaking infrastructure upgrades, an NGA tech official said last week.
NGA’s cloud strategy includes a Finance and Operations (FinOps) plan – currently in draft stages – with a projected release in fiscal year (FY) 2025, said James Cherry, division chief of Hybrid Cloud Services at NGAO, speaking at an AFCEA Luncheon Series event on Nov. 12.
The agency, which uses satellite imagery and mapping to support national security and defense efforts, will establish its proposed CCoE in FY2026, according to Cherry. This center will govern cloud solutions available to the entire agency.
“We want to be the governance and oversight authority at NGA really tasked with ensuring that all NGA cloud customers have the knowledge and tools necessary to securely and efficiently utilize the wealth of services and capabilities available through the CSPs,” Cherry said about the CCoE. “We do a lot of work around FinOps, and that’s really going to be a huge thrust to really aggregate the billing information from each of those CSPs.”
Other plans for the agency include going from a single cloud provider to multiple clouds, which Cherry said has created challenges.
“It’s not as easy as we’re going to build out for every cloud service provider … so we have three domains on classified secret and top secret … that’s absolutely not really feasible,” said Cherry, who added that NGA has been looking at how to “leverage those cloud service providers without breaking mission.”
That process includes evaluating vendors to choose the “best of breed offering” solutions from various providers and looking into co-location facilities – shared data center spaces for IT infrastructure – that will enable the NGA to effectively interconnect with cloud service providers (CSPs).
“Right now, we’re working internally to determine how a task order [will group workloads], we call it the commercial cloud enterprise contract,” said Cherry.
The agency is also exploring the use of multi-cloud landing zones, which are centralized, pre-configured environments designed to simplify and secure interactions with CSPs. Planned Future Operations (FluOps) will regularly assess NGA’s capabilities and mission alignment. “This will assess geo and use requirements and emerging technologies to inform out your POM [program objective memorandum] requests and our budgeting process,” Cherry said.
Looking ahead to FY2025–FY2029, NGA’s strategy will focus on balancing innovation, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, while overcoming the complexities of managing multiple providers. The agency is also refining its financial practices to sustain its mission as cloud environments rapidly evolve.
“As we try to navigate that, our biggest goal, of course, is to not break mission, but still be able to leverage what each of these CSPs have to offer,” said Cherry.
