Marching Toward The Cloud

“I’m actually looking forward to the day when Cloud is my legacy environment; where it becomes part and parcel of how I’m doing business on a day to day basis; where things like Web 2.0 applications are part and parcel of our business,” said DISA’s Henry Sienkiewicz.

Sienkiewicz, the Technical Program Director, Computer Services at DISA, talked about how DISA envisions using Cloud Computing during a recent Federal Executive Forum on Cloud Computing broadcast on Federal News Radio.

Joining Sienkiewicz on the panel hosted by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Ronald Bechtold, Army Architecture Integration Center, at Headquarters, Department of the Army, Chief Information Office/G6

·         Curt Aubley, Technology Officer CTO Operations & Next Generation Solutions, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services

·         Dale Wickizer, Chief Technology Officer-Public Sector, NetApp, Inc.

·         Aileen Black, Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc.

Sienkiewicz talked about a future where wikis, blogs, mashups are used as critical tools in the daily operational environment for communication inside the department.

He said for the user it’s pretty much self service. For the environment, Cloud Computing provides elasticity. “Security becomes streamlined; it’s very easy and straight forward to bring a new application in -- at least with these widgets and mashups,” explained Sienkiewicz.

What is delivered is transparency on the way that DISA is delivering services. Customers can see what they are doing with real metrics. Now there are real benchmarks for accountability because there’s standardization and homogeneity underneath the environment. Read More Below

"The Army is an organization with a long tradition of decentralized execution," Ronald Bechtold, the director of the Army Architecture Integration Center, Chief Information Office/G6, told the Federal Executive Forum audience. Bechtold's mission is making the US motto “E Pluribus Unum” a reality for the Army. And he is counting on Cloud Computing to help him accomplish his mission. Read More

Cloud Covered

“We have Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, public Clouds, private Clouds, hybrid accommodations,” Lockheed Martin’s Curt Aubley told the Forum audience. Aubley and his colleagues have been researching and developing Cloud solutions for more than three years, looking to solve problems that were hard to tackle with current technologies -- often in very creative ways. Read More

Cloud Stewards

Dale Wickizer’s job is to help educate NetApp customers and help them figure out how to be better stewards of their data infrastructure. “With Infrastructure-as-a-Service now practical to do, I can’t think of a greater time or a greater need for being able to protect your data as all the changes going on,” said Wickizer, who is CTO, Public Sector for NetApp, Inc. “If you have good fallback strategies, you have consistent ways of doing backup so you are protected as well as being more efficient.” Read More

Cloud Underpinnings

Aileen Black, the Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc., is not shy about saying these are exciting times for the federal IT community. “Virtualization and Cloud Computing are really going to allow customers to do more with less. We believe virtualization is the underpinning of Cloud Computing,” said Black during the Forum. “This underpinning allows you to create a fabric across all your resources both internally and externally to provide a presentation of all the resources to the end." Read More

Cloud Constituency

Sienkiewicz said the DISA computing services team is pushing the Cloud inside the Defense Department.

“When we are looking at the Cloud, DISA as the institutional provider of computing services for the Defense Department, we are really looking across an entire spectrum of services and changing the paradigm on how we are delivering services out to our constituency, whether it’s a Warfighter in the field, or a Warfighter back in the sustaining base, or one of our vendor partners.”

“We are looking across the entire gamut of Cloud. We are looking at Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Applications-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service.”

That’s quite a challenge for an institutional provider of IT services that has gone through a series of transformations over the last couple of decades, including everything from data center consolidations from 190 plus to today’s 13, to embracing virtualization technologies, to increasing managed services.

“We just see Cloud really as the next iteration on where we are moving on delivering services,” noted Sienkiewicz. “The key component of it all is we are looking at this very much as a service delivery model.”

He explained that DISA managed services contracts use O&M dollars, not procurement dollars. “We are looking at how we allow people to pay by the use.” explained Sienkiewicz. “We are changing that part of the procurement model; we are working very heavily with the development community on defining those standards and best practices so that we can easily move the applications servers into the environment.”

The end result is being able to support the Warfighter better. So across the board we are seeing the Cloud as an enabler and it’s a challenge to us; it’s a good goal Sienkiewicz said. •