Dana Deasy, Department of Defense (DoD) chief information officer (CIO) and 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, recently discussed the department's initiatives to advance the cloud platforms for critical defense mission sets, FedScoop reported on Thursday.
“We quickly took a portion of the JEDI engineering team and pivoted them to work with the services, the combatant commands, those early adopters … and said how can we help find homes where you can go and we can at least get energy and effort started,” Deasy said.
Since the DoD Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud acquisition went to court, the department pivoted to find alternative clouds for services, commands and other defense agencies with critical warfighting needs. Deasy noted that the Air Force’s Cloud One program was one of those new homes to “allow us to move forward.”
“Over time, that starts to become problematic because now you’re starting to set up a lot of different solutions in different environments, where you’re going to have to go back and sort out in an enterprise way… we need to help them find their way back home,” Deasy said.
DoD has also worked to prepare for the enactment for JEDI. The department has recently reaffirmed its award of JEDI to Microsoft; however, Amazon will continue to protest the new award.
“We’re doing a lot of work with the services on getting them prepared to move their development processes and cycles to DevOps. So when the JEDI cloud finally does get awarded, we’re not starting on day one. There’s tools that have to be identified. There’s integration environments to be identified. There’s directories that have to be set up that allow people to connect into these worlds. That’s all work that we can continue to do because it sits inside of our ownership already,” Deasy said.
