Three officials with milCloud 2.0 highlighted a range of successful customer use and migration cases to the cloud service at the first-ever milCloud 2.0 Virtual Bootcamp Event on September 10, organized by General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) and MeriTalk.
Powered by GDIT, milCloud 2.0 connects cloud service offerings to Department of Defense (DoD) networks, and provides Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) mission partners with the latest cloud technology at competitive prices and the highest levels of security and performance.
Bob Olson, Vice President, DISA Cloud Services at GDIT, said the use cases show that “milCloud 2.0 is not a one-size-fits-all solution.”
Jason Devine, Cloud Solutions Architect at milCloud 2.0, talked about three different use cases – none of them mentioning the customer organizations involved – that highlight different real-life customer migrations stories.
The first involved a traditional Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering augmented by a dedicated host, “and how we deliver dedicated hosting alongside our virtual environment,” he said. The use case, Devine said, involved a customer with a global community of interest network with a strict performance and security environment. The customer’s existing model, he said, supported many different systems and compute environments, and “their preferred engagement mode with us was hybrid cloud.”
The customer was interested in extending their existing environment into the cloud service model, and wanted to keep systems within on-premise DoD services. Challenges to the project, Devine said, included technical and training issues, and applications that were “extremely sensitive to performance.”
Devine said milCloud 2.0 broke down the work into phases that allowed the customer to consume service resources without converting operational machines, and worked with DISA on a service offering for dedicated hosted instances. The rollout of the resulting work began with a “modest footprint,” he said. “They are currently expanding that footprint, but venturing into new areas that let them more advantage of milCloud 2.0 environments.”
The second use case presented a similar scenario, with the customer being responsible for the machines. The customer in this case he described as an “early adopter” that wanted to manage their own migration using existing expertise and personnel.
He mentioned the customer undertook a community of interest extension to extend their boundary into the cloud, and set up development, test, and production environments in three different areas. According to Devine, the customer, has been successful in its aims, and achieved cost savings in a managed environment while retaining control over their schedule and pace of work.
And the third use case involved IaaS augmented by milCloud 2.0 plus a services overlay – including administrative support, and technical components that cover security and management stacks – “so that from a customer perspective the service is more like managed hosting,” he said.
The customer, Devine said, had a very short project timeline, “had to move quickly, and took advantage of our planning assistance, and our team’s assistance in laying out and executing that plan.” In the end, “we migrated within three months from the time we started to the time they were cutting over their production services,” he said.
To learn more about the use cases discussed and lessons learned, view the event on-demand now.
