The FISMA Focus IPD

Editor’s Note:  DoD’s 44 page Cloud Computing Strategy document is attached here. For more information about DoD’s Cloud Computing Strategy, please see FISMA Focus here.

From: FierceGovernmentIT

By Julie Bird

The Defense Department outlined its strategy for transitioning to cloud  computing, including plans for meeting security requirements and ensuring  information is available to warfighters when needed.

The 44-page DoD Cloud Computing Strategy, released  (.pdf) July 12 by DoD’s chief information officer, Teri Takai, includes four  concurrent steps for transitioning to cloud computing. They are:

1. Fostering adoption of cloud computing by establishing a joint governance  structure to drive the transition, shifting the culture to one of “enterprise  first,” reforming related policies and practices to improve agility and reduce  costs, and winning buy-in from major stakeholders;
2. optimizing data center consolidation to virtualize legacy  applications and data;
3. establishing the DoD Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure. Steps include  incorporating core cloud infrastructure into data center consolidation, using a  cloud service broker to deliver multi-provider cloud services, using the  product-focused Agile development model,  and exploiting cloud innovation  to drive secure information-sharing;
4. leveraging commercial cloud services to expand cloud offerings beyond  those provided by DoD.

Takai’s office will establish a joint enterprise cloud-computing governance  structure to manage implementation of the strategy, according to the report. DoD  says it anticipates challenges including sustaining funding, migrating and  managing data, and tactical users’ dependency on the network.

In his “Open  for Discussion” blog at ITWorld.com, Brian Proffitt notes that the Pentagon  says its server utilization is less than 30 percent.  One cloud-computing  goal is to increase that to at least 60 percent, he writes.

In the vernacular of all things government, DoD calls the initiatives for  “achieving improved mission effectiveness and cybersecurity in a reengineered  information infrastructure” the Joint  Information Environment, or JIE. The DoD Enterprise Cloud Environment is a  component of achieving JIE goals, and the actual DoD cloud computing strategy is  the formal path toward “an agile, secure, and cost-effective service environment  that can rapidly respond to changing mission needs.”

The Pentagon plans to use the Federal Risk and Authorization Management  Program, or FedRAMP, to  standardize the authorization and management of cloud-computing services and  providers.