Making The Cloud Work For The Military

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http://breakingdefense.com/2014/09/making-the-cloud-work-for-the-military/



Making The Cloud Work For The Military
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on September 24, 2014 at 6:15 PM

WASHINGTON: Apple, Amazon, and Google long since outstripped the Pentagon in information technology. But as the military and intelligence community try to take advantage of commercial IT innovation, especially in cloud computing, they have run into harsh limits. Security, long-range bandwidth and the sheer volume of data have created problems for the Pentagon that current commercially available cloud services can’t solve, two senior defense officials told me recently.

The Defense Department will need a different kind of cloud, said Dave Mihelcic, chief technology officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and Dan Doney, chief innovation officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In fact, it’ll need several different kinds of cloud, customized for different missions.

There won’t be “one database to rule them all,” a knowledgeable Hill staffer told me, “[but] having five clouds is better than having 200 data centers,” some of them little more than a bunch of servers in a closet and run by managers lacking cybersecurity expertise. “From a security perspective, the fewer you have the better off you are,” the staffer went on, and from the user perspective, “you go down from having potentially hundreds of [separate] databases that you would have to search, that aren’t always connected, to potentially five or so that are connected.”

That’s a far cry from the single all-encompassing system envisioned by some enthusiasts and originally pursued by the National Security Agency. But dialing down that vision is a logical response to the lessons learned from the NSA’s struggles over the last two years to achieve a single super-cloud, several insiders told my colleague, Colin Clark, at the recent Intelligence & National Security Summit. The Director of National Intelligence himself, James Clapper, had already admitted in May that moving to the cloud did not save money, as he’d hoped.