From: FederalNewsRadio.com 1500 AM
wo months ago, the Pentagon’s chief information officer ordered all of the military services and Defense agencies to come up with plans to migrate their email systems to DoD’s centralized enterprise email offering. But the Navy and Marine Corps still aren’t willing to commit to making the move.
DoD CIO Teri Takai directed every DoD component to deliver up plans by Jan. 3 detailing how they would begin migrating their users to enterprise email by the first quarter of 2015.
The Navy and Marine Corps long have resisted the idea of joining up with the cloud-based email system operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency, arguing they’ve had a cost-effective enterprise email system of their own for more than a decade. And Robert Scott Jack, the Marine Corps’ deputy CIO, said they’re responding to the Takai memo by calculating how much it would cost them to make the move.
“Right now the senior staff of the Department of the Navy have our heads down with our pencils sharpened to do a business case analysis to compare and contrast the cost of going to the defense enterprise email,” he told an AFCEA luncheon in Vienna, Va. Friday. “That will define for the Navy and the Marine Corps our path ahead for our involvement in enterprise email.”
Asked whether the Marine Corps considered it a valid option to stay out of enterprise email despite the DoD directive, Jack demurred.
“We’re going to consider all options that are contained in the business case so that we understand what the fiscal and mission assurance attributes are that are going to be nascent to the Naval response to that question,” he said.
No way out
In the September memo, Takai also designated enterprise email as a core service of the Joint Information Environment, the single set of networking standards, enterprise services and security standards that all of the military services eventually will converge to. And from the point of view of the JIE executive committee, the Pentagon’s senior governing body for the JIE effort, there are no excuses for not moving to enterprise email, at least according to one of its three members.
“There is no escape clause,” Lt. Gen. Mark Bowman, the CIO/J6 for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, said a week after Takai sent the memo out.
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