DISA Eyes Faster Cloud Deployments for Combatant Commands

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s J9 Hosting and Compute Center is working to reduce the time it takes to deliver cloud infrastructure and modernize legacy applications, helping military operators access the computing capabilities more quickly.

During a briefing at TechNet Indo-Pacific in Honolulu, J9 hybrid cloud broker Trisha Huffer outlined a portfolio that emphasizes reduced procurement delays, shortened security timelines and simplified delivery of IT services to military operators.

“We have to deliver secure, resilient capabilities,” Huffer said. “Having powerful cloud tools don’t mean much if getting them takes two years of procurement friction.”

One example is J9’s cloud infrastructure-as-code offering, which uses preconfigured, preauthorized platform-as-a-service templates to help agencies avoid building security baselines from scratch. The service has supported more than 60 DOW deployments and reduced migration schedules by an average of seven months, said Huffer.

J9 can also help engineering teams establish an accredited baseline environment with integrated services in a three- to four-hour session, she said.

The agency is applying a similar approach to application modernization through Reforged, a service to turn legacy applications into modern cloud environments. Its assessment phase has an 18-day procurement lead time and provides technical roadmaps, architecture sizing and fixed costs before customers decide whether to proceed with implementation.

At the tactical edge, J9’s Joint Operational Edge (JOE) service is designed to keep applications running when connectivity to centralized infrastructure is unreliable — a reality for regions like Indo-Pacific. The managed cloud service provides computing resources and cybersecurity at forward locations, allowing mission owners to run workloads locally and synchronize data when connections are restored.

DISA recently expanded professional services within its data-center-as-a-service program to reduce administrative burdens. The team offers more than hosting hardware across its 11 global data centers and also provides more professional services in the day-to-management of a data center environment.

What’s Ahead for DISA J9

The organization is planning additional cloud capabilities and features in fiscal year 2027.

There will be upcoming tech refreshes for those with current active environments in Stratus private cloud, which has full ATO environments for both impact levels 5 and 6.

For JOE specifically, the agency plans to expand the architecture to support edge intelligence and multi-cloud edge hardware refreshes to support increased computing power.

The agency will launch the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) Unified Cloud Management in the second quarter of fiscal 2027. That capability provides a more unified way to manage workloads across commercial cloud providers. The program is also integrating cross-domain-as-a-service capabilities to simplify secure data transfers between classified environments.