DISA reorganizes cloud office

The Defense Information Systems Agency has created a new, centralized organization for its cloud and enterprise service offices, a DISA official said yesterday.

Sharon Woods, executive director for DISA’s Cloud Computing Program Office, took over as acting director of the Hosting and Compute Center Oct 1.

She said Tuesday during the FCW IT Modernization Summit the new unified office is going to “make a really significant difference” for the Defense Department moving forward.

“So the DISA data centers -- and those have a global footprint -- that is now compute operations within the Hosting and Compute Center, and then on the other side is all the different cloud initiatives to include milCloud or [the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability] . . . so now they’re all together as one center in this unified hosting and compute universe where the idea is, you know, let’s make sure that global fabric is in place that’s multilayered with optionality that has both on-[premise] and off-[premise] capabilities so that mission owners have the diversity and optionality that they need,” Woods said.

The Pentagon this month plans to release a solicitation for proposals for the multivendor Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, the successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud contract.

DOD is seeking a “limited number of sources,” namely Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, for the new effort. John Sherman, acting DOD chief information officer, told reporters in July the department planned to also talk to Google, Oracle and IBM.

The Pentagon plans to make the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity awards by April 2022.