The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is applying the lessons learned from its own application move to milCloud 2.0 to help Fourth Estate agencies in their migration to the cloud, said Caroline Bean, milCloud 2.0 program manager at DISA at GDIT Emerge on Tuesday, April 23.
milCloud 2.0, an internally hosted cloud environment with commercial offerings, offers the capabilities of commercial cloud in a DoD-controlled environment on a pay as you go basis for agencies. The program is managed by GDIT, and overseen by DISA.
Bean noted that Fourth Estate agencies, a collection of 31 agencies not under a military service branch, have a mandate to move over 100 data centers to the cloud by December 2020, and are working through their challenges in migration.
“Within DISA, we have actually been migrating our own DISA applications into milCloud 2.0, so we’ve started gathering some lessons, based on what we’ve been seeing,” she said.
One of the main lessons Bean emphasized was the need for support on application rationalization.
“Believe it or not, a lot of folks don’t know what’s in their legacy environment,” Bean said. “And in the Department of Defense, that is definitely something that we need a lot of help with, is app rationalization.”
In its current state, milCloud 2.0 has 119 mission partners and 2,200 workloads, said Bob Olson, senior program director for milCloud 2.0 at General Dynamics Information Technology. Bean noted that they expect milCloud 2.0 to receive impact level 6 authorization this summer, allowing even more protected data to come into the environment.
Through its own migration, DISA will be better positioned to help others move to the cloud, said Bean.
“These challenges will help us, and these lessons that we’re gaining will help us figure out what needs to be done, especially when the Fourth Estate agencies are coming in to milCloud 2.0 as well,” she said.