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DISA Eyes Growth in Private, Commercial Cloud Programs

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Agency leaders anticipate more sites joining its private and commercial cloud solution programs to support military units globally.

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Republic of Korea Air Force Brig Gen. Kim Jung Soo, Combined Forces Command, C35 (center), tours the forward-deployed amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6), Sept. 25, 2024. Photo Credit: U.S. Navy

DISA rolled out its new Joint Operational Edge (JOE) commercial cloud capability to sites in Japan and Germany as agency leaders aim to add additional sites soon.

JOE Product Owner Matt Quinn and Cloud User Experience Chief Adam Ringel briefed attendees at the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu about their vision for cloud services in the region and next steps for these programs.

JOE is part of DISA’s OCONUS Cloud it launched last year and provides compute offerings that could be ordered under the Defense Department’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) vehicle.

The choice between JOE and Stratus, Quinn and Ringel said, is a matter of maturity. Going for private cloud offering Stratus offers a safer entry point for entities just getting started with cloud and can use it as a stepping stone to scalability that you’d find with JOE’s commercial providers. Both are also complementary in a hybrid-cloud environment.

The agency has been executing a massive plan to bring cloud capabilities to the military services and combatant commands globally with programs like JOE and also Stratus. Its plan, called DISA Next, outlines the agency’s goals for the next 10 years — cloud modernization being one of them.

“We must develop a fully functional DOD enterprise cloud environment. That means we must provide both an active and self-managed cloud space. We must enable secure cloud access and provide relevant tools DOD customers need to fully realize cloud capabilities,” DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner wrote in the May document.

This was followed by DOD CIO’s Fulcrum strategy, a roadmap guiding defense components‘ information technology activity and investments.

“We’re really at a tipping point right now where there’s all this great technology that’s out there that we’re leveraging,” said Robert Franzen, deputy customer experience officer at the DOD CIO office, in a June interview about the strategy. “Fulcrum is the nexus so that it bridges the gap between [defense] strategies and technology.”

Quinn and Ringel said they have seen excitement around the new cloud offerings even among early adopters and hope to expand their footprint. This includes diversifying its vendors, which “Fulcrum positions us for,” they said. “The future needs to be this joint environment from which everyone can build.”

The agency is planning to run a joint exercise for Stratus in early April and then larger joint exercises in August.

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