The first Department of Defense (DoD) application has successfully migrated to milCloud 2.0. Managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Forge.mil became the first DoD app with a production environment to be fully hosted in the on-premise infrastructure-as-a-service offering operated by General Dynamics Information Technology.
Forge.mil, a suite of services designed to accelerate the development and deployment of software and services within the DoD, is also the first application to use DISA’s cloud-security service provider (CSSP) solution and is the first to go through the accreditation process.
“We have lots of lessons learned, which we are sharing with the ‘fourth estate’ and we’re working closely with the DoD CIO to do that,” said Caroline Bean, milCloud 2.0’s program manager.
DISA’s milCloud 2.0 connects commercial cloud service offerings to DoD networks in a private deployment model and includes an integrated suite of cloud-based infrastructure services.
Forge.mil is one of 53 agency-owned applications that DISA is migrating to milCloud 2.0 in an effort to reduce the DoD’s data center footprint and streamline cybersecurity infrastructure for efficiency. The app migrated from milCloud 1.0, which has been used since 2016. The migration process took about six months to complete, but the program office is hoping that this initial process will provide them insight to make future migrations more efficient. Helpful in the migration, was that the application was already virtualized on milCloud 1.0. Non-virtualized applications will take longer to migrate directly to milCloud 2.0.
“The migration and accreditation processes for those coming after Forge.mil should be shorter. We know a lot more and we’re a lot smarter than when we first started,” Bean said.
The DoD CIO and DISA team have already conducted application and system assessments for 18 fourth estate agencies to determine which would achieve greater efficiency by migrating to milCloud 2.0.
