If you’re interested in cloud computing, you should look into the activities at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). DISA provides complex IT services for DoD including network services, computing services, and complex application development services. DISA is also a leading example of cloud computing in the U.S. Federal government. For example, it has created its Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) to automatically provision resources for application testing and development. RACE is complemented by FORGE.mil, a series of open source collaborative development components. DISA will also lead the effort to consolidate thousands of e-mail and Sharepoint domains across the military into global enterprise services.
I participated in the Virtualization, Cloud, and Green Computing summit in Washington DC for the past few days and heard a review of DISA’s cloud progress from its CIO, Henry Sienkiewicz. Henry was talking leading edge stuff and as a geeky analyst, I was all ears.
When it came to the Q&A portion of his presentation however, I was quickly brought back to earth by the reality of DISA’s mission. The first question came from an Air Force officer who was leaving Washington DC that evening headed back to the Middle East. In contrast to the whiz-bang cloud computing efforts in Washington, the officer asked what DISA could do to help with network communications in Afghanistan. Both the Army and Air Force are responsible for IT activities in theater and they go about their business in different ways. Army people tend to go in and set up quickly, ready to move IT assets at any time. The Air Force on the other hand takes a more strategic view and sets up for longer engagements. Neither approach is right or wrong–the problem is that Army and Air Force troops don’t really coordinate their efforts leading to redundancy, inefficiency, and IT downtime.
The second real problem is bandwidth. While we here in the States have a choice between fiber providers, there isn’t any glass in the ground in Afghanistan. Army guys may run fiber and then leave it in the ground when they leave, but most communication is based upon satellites. This makes for a very thin pipe–not nearly enough to take advantage of rich DISA cloud applications running in Ft. Meade, MD.
CIO Sienkiewicz said he was aware of the problems and responded to the requests in general terms. When I spoke to the Air Force officer later, he told me that Sienkiewicz approached him after his talk to reassure him that he understood his plight. It seems that DISA’s CIO started his career in the Army infantry so he was extremely empathetic. Sienkiewicz really doesn’t own this problem, but my guess is that he will try and work with others at DoD to fix it.
There is a lesson to be learned in this dialogue. We in IT love to work on vision and hate to fix the mundane things that are broken. The Air Force officer’s issue is nothing new–telecommunications carriers have been struggling with the “last mile” of the network forever. In this case however, the last mile isn’t between a telecom CO and a residential neighborhood demanding HDTV, it is between “boots on the ground” and command-and-control units engaged in life-and-death communications. Cloud computing rapid deployment, resource optimization, and burstable capacity-on-demand are extremely beneficial, assuming we have the networks in place to take advantage of these resources. For the sake of our troops, let’s all hope that these prosaic yet critical network issues are addressed ASAP.
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Tags: Cloud Computing, DISA, DOD, Henry Sienkiewicz, US Army, USAF
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