The Defense Information Systems Agency plans to expand in fiscal year 2025 to more American units outside the continental United States its Joint Operational Edge, or JOE, cloud platform operating with a commercial system extension.
JOE’s hybrid OCONUS cloud operation, currently confined within the Indo-Pacific Command following its introduction in August 2023, seeks to connect the gap dividing cloud and edge computing to overcome operational problems in denied or degraded communication environments, DISA said Friday.
According to Adam Ringel, DISA J-9 Hosting and Compute Directorate OCONUS Cloud user experience chief, the JOE platform provides the physical computing hardware at the edge when a commercial provider is unable to deliver communication.
DISA Private Cloud Deployed
DISA is addressing the commercial shortfall through its private cloud Stratus, which is now operating in U.S. military units in Hawaii, Japan and Europe. The agency said Stratus is a multi-tenant platform with secure and scalable features complementing public cloud capabilities.
The platform can run applications that requires high bandwidth while also providing the flexibility and resource sharing provided by commercial cloud systems, DISA added.
JOE Contract Opportunities
The agency is looking beyond Stratus in its continuing efforts to test and refine the JOE cloud platform, which uses AWS Outpost to deliver the capability to INDOPACOM.
The platform’s goal is to have its capabilities available not only through AWS but also via Microsoft, Oracle and Google under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, Ringel said. “These edge deployments will ensure that mission partners have the tools they need, no matter where they operate,” he added.
