Air Force gears up for full implementation of enterprise IT 'as-a-service' in FY-22

Air Force officials are poised to fully implement their enterprise information technology “as-a-service” model later this fiscal year, transferring responsibility for basic networking and commodity IT work out of the service and freeing up airmen and guardians for mission defense work.

Known as EITaaS, the effort’s next phase will come after the Air Force completes its implementation of risk-reduction measures, allowing officials to learn and apply lessons derived from experimentation to better inform the acquisition strategy, the service’s Enterprise IT Director Venice Goodwine said during a C4ISRNET event Tuesday.

Involving commercial services and vendors to enable full implementation, she said, will allow airmen and guardians at a given base to move away from performing touch labor and toward ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data, among other things.

“Those are the types of things you’ll see our airmen do now and that’s what we’re preparing them to do as a result when we fully implement EITaaS,” she said.

The Air Force in spring 2021 announced plans to roll out EITaaS upgrades under a planned “Wave 1” -- the first set of IT services expanded from the risk-reduction effort -- to a series of bases over the summer, as officials continued experiments with those end user services at eight military installations. At the time, the press release noted EITaaS had planned to award a contract by March 2022.

Goodwine -- who began serving as the service’s enterprise IT head over the summer after holding various military positions and most recently working as the Agriculture Department’s chief information security officer -- noted there will be cost savings associated with full implementation, but she categorized it as “a side benefit.”

Beyond ensuring that EITaaS stays “on course” with its FY-22 timeline, Goodwine said her other near-term priorities include continuing to invest in and work on concepts to move along adoption of zero trust in addition to accelerating the adoption of cloudONE.