Doug Cossa, chief information officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said DIA is working to evolve federal systems past a “stovepipe” information technology model by advancing an initiative called “Company Storefront” in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.
Under Company Storefront, DIA and NGA are working to provide agencies common infrastructure services, including desktop services, for the classified environment.
“Agencies don’t have to maintain their own data centers or their own infrastructure services,” Cossa told FNN.
“They can adopt the model that we’re able to extend out to the rest of the community that integrates because it was designed that way from the beginning,” he added.
Cossa said he thinks Company Storefront will eventually offer cloud services to enable agencies to transition to a virtual desktop environment.
“I think that is the future of where we’ll go is more virtual desktop, and that’s where we really rely on the vendor community to not only work with us, but work across the other vendors to be able to have integration across the services that we depend on,” Cossa said. “Because it’s not an option for us to go back into a stovepipe model where we’re purchasing capabilities or bringing capabilities into our environment that don’t talk with anything else.”
