Understand the Department of Defense's designation of DISA as the DOD enterprise cloud service broker in 2012
Although the Department of Defense is a cabinet-level agency, because of its size, the nature of the data it handles, and its mission to protect America's security, the cloud computing strategy of the DoD further builds upon the Federal CIO's Cloud Computing Strategy of 2011, providing strategic approaches unique to the mission of the DoD and intelligence community.
On July 11 2012, the DOD released its cloud computing strategy, which includes a four step process to gradually ramp DOD branches and components into the cloud.
Fostering cloud adoption
The first step is to foster adoption of cloud computing.
- Establish a joint governance structure to drive the transition to the DoD Enterprise Cloud Environment
- Adopt an "Enterprise First" approach that will accomplish a cultural shift to facilitate the adoption and evolution of cloud computing
- Reform DoD IT financial, acquisition, and contracting policy and practices that will improve agility and reduce costs
- Implement a cloud computing outreach and awareness campaign to gather input from the major stakeholders, expand the base of consumers and providers, and increase visibility of available cloud services throughout the Federal Government
The DoD recognized that the cloud can provide much better capabilities than it could provide itself and that it was time to embrace that mantra.
Data center optimization
The second step is to optimize data center consolidation. The DoD used to have more data centers than any private sector or public sector entity.
- Consolidate and virtualize legacy applications and data
Data centers are costly to operate. Not only is there the acquisition of land, but there is the construction, the cooling, the power, the security of, the accreditation, and then ongoing operational costs. Because of numerous mandates put into place, the DoD was not benefitting from the agility that the cloud model promotes.
In commercial cloud offerings, cloud service providers (CSPs) could enable a cloud customer to consume 1 TiB of storage space in a matter of seconds. For the DoD, that process would need to follow the procurement process, needed to be funded, needed to have a storage drive obtained and sent to a previously established and secured data center, needed to be scanned, needed to be mounted, and needed to be mounted and made available. That end-to-end process could take up to three months just to make available the space.
DOD enterprise cloud infrastructure establishment
The third step is the establishment of a DoD Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure.
- Incorporate core cloud infrastructure into data center consolidation
- Optimize the delivery of multi‐provider cloud services through a Cloud Service Broker
- Drive continuous service innovation using Agile, a product‐focused, iterative development model
- Drive secure information sharing by exploiting cloud innovation
There are hundreds of services made available by cloud service providers, such as Microsoft. Rather than having each group within each department of defense component deploy its own services in a different manner, it makes sense for a unified set of reference architectures to be made available so that deployments are standardized.
Cloud services delivery
Finally, is the delivery of cloud services.
- Continue to deliver DoD Enterprise cloud services
- Leverage externally provided cloud services, i.e., commercial services, to expand cloud offerings beyond those offered within the Department.
Rather than having different groups in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches contract separately with cloud service providers, the DoD felt it was best for a single entity to serve as the DOD Enterprise Cloud Service Broker. As the Broker, that entity would be tasked with creating a model for using the cloud computing through different service providers.
In this strategy document, DISA was identified as the Enterprise Cloud Service Broker, and since then has developed a model for using various cloud service providers.
Lasting effects
It’s important to note that while this strategy document did establish several very important motions, it was later rescinded and replaced by subsequent strategy documents. It ultimately did help to rapidly push various groups to consolidate DoD data centers.