Agencies within the Intelligence Community (IC) will be moving towards a Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) strategy and a Hybrid Compute Initiative (HCI), IC CIO John Sherman said today.
Speaking at the AFCEA NOVA event, Sherman outlined the progress that IC has made over the past year and how that progress has enabled modernization and plans to issue a solicitation for HCI in March.
“Now the importance of us in the IC moving to a multi-cloud enterprise cannot be overstated,” Sherman said, adding “and I’m very proud of where we’re heading on this.”
According to Sherman, C2E will provide a multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment, possible infrastructure on and off premises, and cloud services at all three security levels of unclassified, secret, and top secret.
HCI on the other hand will assist IC in addressing “massive data processing and analytic requirements.” Additionally, HCI will help with a reduction in legacy data centers, complement IC’s elastic compute capabilities, and modernize its GovCloud. The National Security Agency (NSA) will also be able to vacate several of its legacy databases.
“I will emphasize NSA and we the IC writ large need both arrows in our quiver: C2E as well as HCI,” Sherman said.
Other priority points for IC going forward include progress on its Data Center Strategy that Sherman says could be published by November. Key mission drivers also depend on making progress with wireless technology, though, Sherman did not specify which wireless technologies, specifically.
“It really is an incredible opportunity, and I’m absolutely confident we’re doing right by our mission statements both current and the future,” Sherman said.
