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Defense
The new offerings aim to help accelerate cloud adop- tion at DOD. A 2018 memo required defense agencies and DOD field activities to migrate all appropriate workloads to milCloud 2.0 by the end of fiscal 2020, but only one in five have been doing so, according to research conducted by MeriTalk.
General Dynamics Information Technology owns and operates the technology stack for milCloud 2.0, and Jim Matney, vice president and general manager of the Defense Information Systems Agency and Enterprise Services Sec- tor at GDIT, said the recent additions will help speed adop- tion for three important reasons: ease of use, security and cost.
“We have seen a significant amount of interest in mis- sion partners leveraging AWS and the milCloud offering, the on-premises offering, via the milCloud 2.0 contract,” Matney said. “This has really put milCloud 2.0 on the map.” He said the number of workloads that have migrated to the platform doubled in 2020 compared to 2019.
The government’s complex acquisition process is often blamed for delays in cloud adoption, but because the mil- Cloud 2.0 contract has already been awarded, customers can create an account, deposit funds and have cloud ser- vices running within 48 hours, Matney said.
He added that the refactoring and other prep work defense organizations must perform before migrating appli- cations to the cloud is streamlined because milCloud 2.0 now incorporates the VMware virtualization platform that many agencies already use in their data centers.
JEDI
COURT WILL HEAR CASE ALLEGING TRUMP INTERFERENCE IN JEDI
Amazon Web Services’ lawsuit alleging undue influence on the cloud award has survived a U.S. government motion to dismiss the claim
By Adam Mazmanian
A federal court will allow a complaint to proceed that alleges political inference by former President Donald Trump in the award of a $10 billion, 10-year cloud com- puting contract to Microsoft in 2019.
Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Fed- eral Claims issued a ruling under seal on April 28 denying a motion by the U.S. government to dismiss the claim. That means a lawsuit by Amazon Web Services, which alleges that Trump actively steered the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Microsoft, can go forward. If the U.S. government continues with the case, it must successfully argue that Trump did not act improp- erly during the lengthy and contested solicitation process.
tion to keep moving forward on cloud adoption. “Regardless of the JEDI cloud litigation outcome, the department continues to have an urgent, unmet require- ment — specifically, the department’s need for enterprise- wide, commercial cloud services for all three classification levels, extending from the homefront to the tactical edge, at scale,” the document states. “We remain fully committed to meeting this requirement — we hope through JEDI — but this requirement transcends any one procurement, and we will be prepared to ensure it is met one way or another.”
To ensure that cybersecurity requirements don’t stall DOD cloud migrations, milCloud 2.0 has built an on-prem- ises cloud service inside the DOD Information Network, which provides an additional layer of security for applica- tions that need it, Matney said. “By migrating their appli- cations to the cloud that’s already in the DODIN, that would reduce that landscape,” he added. “You minimize the number of threat vectors” a hacker could target.
Finally, because milCloud 2.0 is built on DODIN, it doesn’t come with the additional transaction and band- width fees that many cloud providers charge.
GDIT has historically provided an on-premises, infra- structure-as-a-service, fit-for-purpose cloud. DOD’s Cloud Strategy, released in 2018, states that when a general-pur- pose cloud solution, such as AWS, cannot support mission needs, DOD may use a fit-for-purpose commercial or on- premises cloud solution. With milCloud 2.0’s new setup, customers have access to both in one place.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program is also intended to deliver general-purpose cloud across DOD, but JEDI remains bogged down in legal challenges (see “Court will hear case alleging Trump interference in JEDI,” at right). In an information paper to Congress about the litigation, the DOD CIO’s office emphasizes its inten-
30 May 2021 FCW.COM