Military officials highlighted new advances in cloud management and plans to expand multi-cloud environments during a Federal News Network webinar Tuesday, emphasizing collaboration with commercial technology providers to support military operations.
Leaders from the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard said their services are building more scalable and automated cloud infrastructures while incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and improved financial management practices.
Army focuses on automation, scalability
Thomas Sasala, executive director of the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, said the service has spent the past year improving technology, scalability, and automation within its cloud environment.
“The biggest changes we’ve made over the past year is really around technology and getting organized for battle,” Sasala said.
The Army currently operates in a multi-cloud environment that includes Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and is expanding to additional cloud providers. Sasala said the agency is adopting automation and AI technologies to improve performance monitoring, transparency for customers, and financial management.
He also highlighted how the Army is moving toward a FinOps model to better track and manage cloud spending. That includes predictive analysis to determine whether systems are over- or under-subscribed and automated scaling tools that adjust computing resources based on demand.
Sasala said these efforts are designed to help the Army optimize cloud infrastructure and use taxpayer dollars more efficiently over the next year.
Navy consolidating cloud environments
Christina Genoise Zerbi, deputy director for the Navy’s Neptune Cloud Management Office, said the Navy has spent the past two years consolidating cloud environments that were initially developed across separate commands.
She said that the service moved about 1,000 workloads to the cloud out of roughly 10,000 systems, but encountered scalability challenges that required rethinking its architecture.
“We found that we got to a point where we couldn’t scale further in a reliable way,” Zerbi said.
The Navy is now implementing a common architecture across the Department of the Navy and building a multi-cloud framework that includes Google Cloud and Oracle alongside Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Over the next year, Zerbi said the Navy plans to focus heavily on security and on improving acquisition strategies so mission owners can access cloud services more easily.
Coast Guard prioritizes software modernization
Jonathan White, a commander and cloud and data branch chief in the Coast Guard’s C5ISC Infrastructure Services Division, said the service is implementing its Force Design 2028 plan, which includes establishing a centralized software development and delivery command.
The service has also developed an integrated data environment designed to move, secure, catalog, and process data from across the organization. The platform enables analytics and supports operators in the field by improving access to operational data.
“The cloud is optimized for data,” White said.
The Coast Guard has already built a multi-cloud environment connected to its on-premises systems and currently operates more than 20 mission-critical workloads in production, White said.