Top Three Questions for the DoD Cloud Journey

DoD is invest­ing heav­i­ly in Cloud Migra­tions, but sev­er­al unan­swered ques­tions exist.  The top three ques­tions for me are:

1. What about the networks?
2. What about the data?
3. What Cloud Ser­vice Provider (CSP) is the standard?

Hav­ing these three ques­tions con­tin­ue to go unan­swered mud­dies the Warfight­er to have a com­pre­hen­sive approach to hav­ing an Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Stan­dard. To under­stand why it is impor­tant to have answers to each ques­tion, let’s explore each one individually. 

What about the Network?

It goes to the old joke that the Cloud is just some­one else com­put­er. Fun­ny but true. To access the Cloud, you have to access it from a net­work. The next log­i­cal step is to ques­tion how reli­able the net­work is. Does the net­work have mul­ti­ple path­ways to access the Cloud? What is the cur­rent laten­cy? What is the cost of updat­ing the net­work to have the nec­es­sary cus­tomer expe­ri­ence? More impor­tant, what is the mis­sion impact when the Cloud is not acces­si­ble? Unlike the com­mer­cial sec­tor, the Warfight­er can not take the day off when the net­work is down. Part of the con­cern is the rur­al mil­i­tary instal­la­tions that depend on the local Inter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISP), which are high­ly like­ly to uti­lize Huawei tele­com equip­ment as a cost-sav­ing mea­sure for their infra­struc­ture. That is why the U.S. gov­ern­ment is stop­ping the future pro­cure­ment of Huawei tele­com equip­ment. Before DoD orga­ni­za­tions go ful­ly into the Cloud, it is pru­dent to ensure that we have done our due dili­gence to ensure redun­dant com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels,  not uti­liz­ing pos­si­ble com­pro­mised net­works, while improv­ing the exist­ing ones. 

What about the Data?

Clive Hum­by, a British math­e­mati­cian and data sci­en­tist, stat­ed, “Data is the new oil.” The DoD is doing its best to be able to refine this data into knowl­edge, which in turn, into action. The chal­lenge with data, sim­i­lar to oil, is that it takes time to refine data to make it usable. The DoD, as a whole, strug­gles to have usable data. For years, the Knowl­edge Man­age­ment teams were respon­si­ble for data refine­ment by meta-tag­ging data, estab­lish­ing file plans, and cul­ti­vat­ing Share­Point por­tals to make data accessible. 

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Knowl­edge Man­age­ment was per­ceived by many with­in the com­mu­ni­ty as a bureau­crat­ic process slow­ing down the Warfight­er. Hence, the data is now not in a for­mat that is usable for more advanced tech­niques like Big Data, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, or Machine Learn­ing strug­gles to use. Worse, the data is now in the hands of a few indi­vid­u­als with a select under­stand­ing of tech­nol­o­gy with­out under­stand­ing the nuance of the data itself. 

What Cloud Service Provider is the Standard?

For years, the com­mu­ni­ty has worked towards devel­op­ing their staff to be knowl­edge­able in either Ama­zon Web Ser­vices or Microsoft Azure because of the promise of the JEDI con­tract. Few brave souls tried to jour­ney into DISA Cloud One or U.S. Air Force Plat­form One with mixed results tout­ed with good mar­ket­ing. How­ev­er, when the JEDI con­tract got con­test­ed, it intro­duced two more com­pet­ing tech­nol­o­gy stacks, Ora­cle Cloud Infra­struc­ture (OCI) and Google Cloud Plat­form (GCP), through the Joint Warfight­er Cloud Capa­bil­i­ty (JWCC) Con­tract. This caus­es an issue because only a few cleared resources com­pre­hend either of the six CSPs well at the archi­tec­tur­al lev­el, leav­ing agen­cies to com­pete for cleared resources.  An ill-defined inter­op­er­abil­i­ty plan fur­ther com­pli­cates mat­ters, leav­ing the DoD short of its goal of being Cloud Agnostic. 

Where do we go next on the Cloud Journey?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the above address­es only a few key ques­tions that deci­sion-mak­ers must con­sid­er when con­sid­er­ing their DoD Cloud Jour­ney. With­out a holis­tic view of what is required to have a suc­cess­ful jour­ney, the Warfight­er is with­out the nec­es­sary capa­bil­i­ties to fight cur­rent and future wars. We also lack enforce­able stan­dards of hav­ing a glide path for mov­ing parts of the infra­struc­ture to the Cloud. As a col­lec­tive, we have to be bet­ter than that for War Fighter.