A top Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) official offered a look today at DISA’s ongoing efforts to provide cloud services to military branches outside the contiguous U.S. (OCONUS), noting the agency’s successes specifically with the Stratus cloud program during remarks at the WEST 2024 conference in San Diego, Calif., co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute.
Jonathan Williams, the program manager for Stratus – DISA’s private cloud solution – said that the program is continuing to “grow and evolve,” and announced plans to extend Stratus further into the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) region.
DISA unveiled its OCONUS cloud service push in August 2023 by announcing that its Stratus private cloud solution was operational at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, marking a step forward in the agency’s work to establish a global cloud infrastructure.
“We’ve had a great opportunity to expand Stratus outside of the United States and actually bring it into OCONUS regions, again, because we are already on U.S. sovereign soil outside of the contiguous United States, thus, making the data sovereignty issues that have plagued other vendors less of an issue for us,” Williams said. “We are we are still on U.S. sovereign soil while we are in INDOPACOM, while we are in Yukon.”
“Our initial push for OCONUS cloud, our first expansion of Stratus, and our first pilot location for joint operational edge (JOE) … was into Hawaii, and our Stratus stack there is live and operational, ready for workload,” he added.
The Stratus program lead highlighted DISA’s plans to extend the private cloud solution further into the INDOPACOM region.
“Why we are continuing to press INDOPACOM specifically, being a theater that is so geographically dispersed as opposed to all other COCOM theaters – stretching all the way from Alaska to Guam to Australia,” Williams said.
“I mean, the entire INDOPACOM theater is huge, and so we are taking that into consideration as we expand Stratus, as we expand JOE, making sure that we are providing resilient cloud capabilities in a massively geographically dispersed region,” he added.
“At the moment we’re extending it into Japan, and we have future plans to move it into other regions within INDOPACOM,” Williams said. “So, Stratus will continue to grow and evolve.”
Williams also expanded on DISA’s success with JOE – the deployment of commercial cloud edge devices OCONUS.
“Our first foray under joint operational edge was a three-way partnership between USSOCOM, DoD CIO and then DISA, and we have worked closely throughout this process to bring that AWS outpost – which was the initial offering … into Hawaii,” he explained. “It was installed over the summer and we’re working through the accreditation process now to bring folks on. The line to get on that is huge – we are seeing a massive amount of demand signal right now to move on to the JOE outpost.”
“JOE in INDOPACOM … provides cloud native experience,” Williams said. “So, all we’re doing is extending the cloud. So, everything that you are accustomed to and used to in commercial cloud and CONUS – all that still has to exist. All we’re doing is bringing a portion of that and projecting it to the operational edge trying to get it as close to the warfighter as we can at a fixed location close by.”
Finally, the Stratus program lead touched on the third prong of DISA’s OCONUS cloud strategy: tactical edge equipment.
“This is the handheld, this is the small form factor that actually will go into harm’s way,” Williams said. “So, because of that it’s important that we have complete faith and trust that those devices are going to function as they’re intended to because when they need to is when it really matters. It’s not about email. It’s about life-or-death situations.”
The DISA official said that a joint team headed up by a soldier and Army captain are currently putting these devices to the test.
Williams said, “They’ve found ways to successfully implement these devices and ways to develop that confidence in that device that is not just a toaster with vendor sticker on the side of it, it’s actually a cloud device, a handheld or a backpack mounted cloud device, that is going to perform as it is supposed to.”
