The Department of Navy‘s chief information officer released a memorandum last week which said the Navy and Marine Corps should begin migrating some of their information technology systems to the cloud.The announcement comes after a pilot conducted with Amazon Web Services, according to Jared Serbu of Federal News Radio article.
Terry Halvorsen, the department of the Navy’s CIO, said low impact” information systems would be the first to move to commercial providers.
According to the article, the Defense Information Systems Agency acts as the single cloud broker for the DoD but is still figuring out how they will play there role in the deal.
“Therefore, pending further guidance from the DoD CIO, the DON must move forward and employ capable solutions that meet mission and security requirements and provide the best value,” said Halvorsen in the memo.
DON seeks to “employ capable solutions”. The question is “what components of those solutions can be sourced from the cloud?” All too often, “cloud” is seen as “the solution” rather than a viable component of a solution that offers greater flexibility, accessibility and scalability than local host-blased components.
It is this inability of architecture teams to see cloud from a component functionality perspective and the inability of the procurement system to appropriately source and price cloud as a component that is making progress difficult.
Also it is the very service models that NIST has settled on (platform, software & infrastructure), that are impeding meaningful adoption.
I contend that simply changing the location of a service from network to cloud does not offer sufficient advantages. Think of it like trying to improve the logging industry with chain saws wielded in the same manner as you would wield an axe. Different technology with great potential wasted due to improper implementation. Cloud can offer these significant advantages but only if we re-think our definitions and architectures around its advantages.