The Challenges to Meeting DoD Requirements

In a recent keynote address, Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy said, “The warfighter needs access to intelligence and communication to enable quick decision-making and maintain a competitive edge.”

That sounds like a no-brainer, but the reality is that achieving robust access is no easy task for an organization as large and complex as DoD. To share intelligence data, protect warfighters and meet critical mission goals, the Department needs multiple IT resources.

DoD needs storage to house the trillions of data points that internal systems, external sensors and defense personnel generate. It also requires computing power to fuel applications for logistics, business needs, and cyber operations. And the Department needs networking to connect all the applications and workloads that keep the entire government running.

To obtain this functionality, DoD has looked to cloud environments to provide flexible and scalable resources. But in a rush to gain cloud capabilities, many departments and components within the agency have deployed single and multi-cloud environments within siloes. As a result, the Department currently operates with multiple clouds that are disparate and disjointed.

That’s a problem. Operating in this manner is costly. Plus, it creates management complexities that take time away from other high-level mission requirements.

Not to mention, this setup requires DoD to have multiple skilled professionals in place to manage these one-off infrastructures. Unfortunately, DoD faces the same issue that has plagued civilian agencies for years: hiring and workforce training. They need the right talent to work on complex systems and to ensure the success of network modernization and cloud migration projects.

The problem is that replacing employees who leave for private-sector jobs or new positions elsewhere in government can be a long, drawn-out process. And once new employees come on board, getting them up to speed can take months because there are so many cloud vendors and technologies to learn.

What DoD and other agencies need is a next-generation solution that goes beyond traditional hyperconverged Infrastructure, to a modern, flexible and cost-effective solution that enables employees to do their jobs more effectively, and without constraints. That solution is an enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure, which we explore in our recent course, Implementing Hybrid Cloud for a Modern DoD Infrastructure. Watch the free, 10-minute course now!