As the Department of Defense (DoD) starts to plan what’s next for the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, a top Pentagon official confirmed today that the department is preparing to release a multi-cloud strategy publicly in the coming months.
At today’s DoD Cloud Workshop in Washington D.C., George Lamb, the director of cloud and software modernization in the DoD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), said the multi-cloud strategy is already circulating internally. Lamb said he expects the strategy to be released to the public in the next “four to six months.”
“We’ve got JWCC for cloud vendors. Initially, by far, the easiest way to use the cloud is they just pick one vendor to use their technology,” Lamb explained. “But we’re finding, the Navy and the Army and the Air Force may pick different technologies, and then you’ve got effectively, a multi-cloud system.”
“You have to have a way to link it,” he continued. “So, we’re looking at the multi-cloud strategy – that’s both how we integrate, and then how do we get resiliency.”
For example, Lamb gave a scenario that if a cyber incident were to occur at Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google, the Pentagon wants to know if it could then “move to Microsoft” to protect its data.
The multi-cloud strategy will help to answer those types of questions, according to Lamb.
“The multi-cloud strategy is a really important one. It’s a lot of reference patterns. We worked on it with MITRE, so we kind of understand the best ways to simplify it,” he said.
Agile Software Directive Also in the Works
Separately, Lamb said his office is also working to develop a department-wide directive that gets rid of the traditional “waterfall” software development methodology and replaces it with an agile software acquisition pathway.
“The CIO, we’re going to actually put down our first instruction as a high-level across the entire department, and that’s going to reference the modern software techniques, and it’s going to push down the authority so that the services can then do the implementations for it,” Lamb said. “But we’re actually at that point where a transition from 30 years of legacy that’s encoded to start changing that to encode the rules for doing modern software.”
As the DoD CIO prepares this directive, Lamb said it is going to pull groups this month from across the entire department for crowdsourcing. Additionally, Lamb expects the document will be helpful for both leading practitioners who are already doing agile software development, as well as those who are lagging behind.
“It’s going to be a synthesis of the best practices that we advertise, we talk about, … [and] synthesize that into something that the leading practitioners can just understand and keep doing what they’re doing,” he said. “The programs that are lagging behind, so the legacy programs that have a really troubled transition getting out of that waterfall – it’s either their leadership is not ready, or their workforce is not ready – it’s going to force them to start moving.”
