Army Building Up Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith

The Army is heavily investing more in its cyber capabilities, including an expanded cloud architecture developed through a combination of com mercial and private platforms.

The overarching plan--released to the public in October--requires the Army to expand its cloud capabilities so that forces can use software applications wherever they are needed, said Raj Iyer, chief information officer for the service.

The need for creating a hybrid architecture--the overlapping usage of public and private clouds connected by a single network--becomes clear as the service looks to operationalize the cloud across different regions, he said. The service will need to move data rapidly to Indo-Pacific Command, Europe and even the tactical edge, he noted.

"We know that we're going to do a combination of something that's hybrid on premise some and then some commercial," he said during the Association of the United States Army annual conference. "So it's going to be both, but getting to the hybrid architecture is our key priority."

A more flexible cloud is needed in Europe in particular, Iyer said. For the first time, the 18th Airborne Corps is using the cloud and Starlink--a satellite constellation operated by Elon Musk's company SpaceX--in support of Ukraine.

"That has never happened before," he said. "We've always relied on taking stacks and stacks of tactical server infrastructure when we deploy and relying heavily on military SATCOM," he said. Connecting the networks and gaining access to a cloud takes days if not weeks, he added.

The Army's vision for a global cloud environment, or cARMY, will create private clouds--extensions of commercial cloud resources and global transport capabilities--that will be connected to a data center.

The service will also create new commercial transportation networks outside the continental United States for data to travel through. Army software applications will migrate to the cloud so they are more accessible in regions where they are needed, according to the plan.

This infrastructure buildup "is critical to be able to provide data, services and capabilities to the tactical edge and achieve an information advantage for the warfighter," the plan noted. Expanding cloud capabilities also means changing the acquisition regime, Iyer said. Currently, commands that want to move to the cloud have to go through about a nine-month contracting process with multiple agencies.

"When money is tight--and it's your execution money--if...