In 2009, President Barack Obama set the U.S. ship of state on a course to use cloud computing. With budget language, Executive Directives and a Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, the federal government moved forward on a plans to re-think its information technology infrastructure. This aggressive transformation will be accomplished by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloudcomputing business model. Surprising to many, the government seems to be adopting this new model much faster that many commercial industries.
The Department of Defense quickly responded to the Commander-in-Chief’s direction. In his May 5, 2009 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber, Identity and Information Assurance Robert F. Lentz said that a private cloud could give the Department of Defense (DoD) the ideal platform with which to provide a virtual computing fabric with almost limitless and infinitely definable processing and storage capacity. In executing on this vision, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) made headlines in 2009 with a multifaceted cloud computing effort that included the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), Forge.mil application development cloud and GIG Content Delivery Service (GCDS) content delivery cloud. The National Security Agency (NSA) even got into the act by announcing its use of the Hadoop file system, an implementation of Google’s MapReduce parallel processing system, to make it easier to “rapidly reconfigure data” address enterprise large data problems. In 2010, DoD seems to be accelerating its cloud computing efforts with multiple efforts announced, including;
A ten-month Air Force effort to develop and demonstrate a secure cloud computing infrastructure capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks; and
A US Transportation Command project aimed at fulfilling its “Distribution Process Owner” mission.
The U.S. Navy’s successful use of Google-hosted InRelief.org to support January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster relief efforts may actually open up the use of public clouds for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) missions. Hosted on a segregated section of the Google platform, InRelief.org also uses Facebook, Twitter and Google Groups as a cloud-based collaboration platform for its users.
So what does this mean for the future of cloud computing in the DoD? Contrary to many early observers, the department is quickly seizing the clear opportunity to significantly reduce their growing data center and IT hardware expenditures. The individual services are also engaged in detailed planning and pilots. With Executive Branch strong encouragement, its 2010 efforts are sure to provide the economic and operational proof points necessary for major funding of cloud computing programs in FY 2012.
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