The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has officially launched its fifth enterprise-wide cloud environment, marking a significant step toward operational efficiency and reduced costs.
NNSA Chief Information Officer (CIO) James Wolff shared that celebratory news on Wednesday and explained that many of those clouds are classified.
“The great news about these things is that they’re very much mission-focused, and they’re very much efficiency-focused,” Wolff said on June 18 during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange. “So, how do we reduce cost and how do we better align against the mission of the organization?”
Wolff explained that NNSA manages “two big secret networks,” one of which is focused on reducing costs by moving to Microsoft 365.
“We really take the hard work of maintaining those systems on-prem and just move it to the cloud. So, that’s where we’ve celebrated two of them actually – the efficiency drive for the entire department,” he said. “We have a goal, and I think we’ll meet it, of moving the entire department to that Microsoft 365 by the end of this year.”
According to Wolff, one national lab – Sandia National Laboratories – has already completed the transition to Microsoft 365. He said seven other labs are currently in the process of moving over as well.
Another milestone NNSA celebrated is related to its mission of nuclear emergency response. Wolff said his team implemented “Microsoft 365 with some additional things” to ensure seamless interoperability with mission partners in this area, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security.
On NNSA’s “other secret network,” Wolff said his team has been more focused on “true alignment to mission,” which in this case is the maintenance of the stockpile of nuclear weapons.
“We started the journey connecting to Amazon AWS, that has been going for quite some time,” the CIO said, adding, “The celebration that I had pointed out was actually us starting the work with Microsoft to kind of build that security perimeter around Microsoft 365 so we can get that same level of efficiency that we’ve seen in other networks.”
However, Wolff noted that not everything is classified, so they also built an unclassified environment that’s “purposely built for the engineering so that we can move back and forth between those two networks.”
“We have an enormous workload right now. There are seven active weapons programs, and to do that well, we’ve got to find ways to just make things faster, which is why we’re doing these big enterprise cloud environments so that we can get everybody interoperating with a model at the same time,” Wolff said.
“We don’t want to be moving pieces of information [or] work back and forth between different sites. We want to be working together, and the best way to do that is to take advantage of enterprise services, and that’s what the cloud is built for,” he said.