Air Force Lt. Col. Ross Morrell, chief of the center of cloud excellence at the U.S. Transportation Command, has said Transcom has initiated efforts to influence the organizational culture in order to facilitate the migration of applications to the cloud.“We brought our acquisition community early on to help us drive the messaging back to the program management community, to say, ‘We [through cloud computing] can help you manage your programs and run your programs better, not just by lifting and shifting to the cloud, but by changing the way you deliver capability,’†Morrell said Wednesday at the Defense Information Systems Agency Cloud Symposium in Baltimore.
He said Transcom also developed a communications strategy with its public affairs team to inform the command about the cloud migration effort.
Morrell cited the three design patterns used by the command to analyze the applications and evaluate the migration options: redesigning applications; lift and shift re-hosting; and refactoring some elements of an application to leverage automation in the cloud.
Mission assurance is the reason behind Transcom’s move to the cloud and Morrell said the command expects to move 70 applications to the cloud by the end of 2018.
“Right now we have Impact Level 2, Impact Level 4 and Impact Level 5 environments, and we’re standing up an Impact Level 6 environment,†he added.
Steve Wallace, technical director for DISA’s development and business center; and Michelle Jacobs, director of the DISA liaison and hosting office at the Defense Logistics Agency; also discussed at the event some of the lessons learned from their cloud migration efforts.
