The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is gearing up to launch a pilot version of its Olympus managed cloud environment in September which aims to provide advanced management capabilities for Pentagon cloud users, an agency official said today.
Les Benito, the chief of product development and management at DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, told reporters at AFCEA International’s TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore today that the Olympus platform is currently in development and the team is assessing “what [capabilities] makes the most sense” to incorporate.
Olympus, which DISA first announced in March, simplifies how defense agencies deploy commercial cloud solutions and build their cloud environments to keep up with the increasing demand for data – which has been a challenge for many agencies within the Defense Department (DoD).
“We heard a lot from our customers that [it’s] great we have the [Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contracts] and we can get cloud easily … but they need help managing those environments,” Benito said.
Olympus, he explained, provides two core services to DoD cloud users — shared services needed for any cloud environment to be successful, and the management of that environment.
“As we look forward to the future, and we start doing things like the multi-cloud and multiple classifications, how do we make it easier to do things like connect between the cloud if you had a secret environment in one cloud environment and you had to connect to another secret environment? How do we make that easier? How do we make that connection in a way that it can be shared across different organizations instead of everybody setting up their own? It’s much easier for us to do it one time instead of a ton of times,” Benito said.
“Instead of having every organization set up [the cloud environment] themselves … why not have a shared environment,” he added.
Additionally, as a service-agnostic platform, Olympus supports integration with various tools and systems such as the DevSecOps platform Vulcan for software development and DISA’s Stratus private cloud offering. Additionally, DISA is looking to host the OLYMPUS platform on all four of the cloud service providers under JWCC.
Benito emphasized that Olympus remains in the early stages of development and that the exact details of capabilities that will be available in the program are still unknown.
“We’ve only been working [on Olympus] for a couple of months at this point,” Benito said, adding that as the team continues to develop the platform it continues to change and take shape.
“Where we started won’t be where we end up at the end of the day, because we continue to iterate. But …the team is working to get the pilot ready. We hope to have it by September, to start bringing folks on board. We’ve already got a few organizations that are interested and excited about coming on,” he said.
