The U.S. Air Force (USAF) is investing in its Cloud One platform to modernize and make applications more portable. However, according to an agency official, executing a migration program of this size is not without its challenges.
The Cloud One platform is a one-stop shop for acquiring secure cloud services. And based on the progress made through the remainder of the fiscal year (FY) 2022, the USAF plans to move more of its programs of record to Cloud One’s services in FY23.
According to Jay Bonci, the chief technology officer for the U.S. Air Force, the plan is to leverage the Air Force’s Cloud One for infrastructure-as-a-service and then use the branch’s Platform One capability as well, “with the intent to speed capability to delivery” for software development.
“We are in a process of maturation and so over the last few years we have worked hard to establish Cloud One and establish the business processes around it,” Bonci said during a virtual event hosted by Federal News Network on March 24. “We have gotten a lot of the early adopters of Cloud One on board and now we are moving onto trying to find the next round of applications and the continued improvement of scalability of the Cloud One platform.”
However, the largest challenge that the Air Force has encountered in this next phase is convincing systems owners to migrate to the Cloud One platform. Because this requires spending extra funds or rearranging the budget for this migration, they are not always inclined to do so.
According to Bonci, migrating more applications onto the Cloud One platform “is going to require us to fund it, and addressing the business model around cloud, that’s probably the largest area of challenge that we have found,” he said.
“The first round we were able to convince those to migrate to cloud one because in their case the business use case was obvious now it’s going to take more work to convince others,” Bonci said.
