The untapped potential of the hyperscale cloud.

• Author: Chronis, Jennifer
• Position: Viewpoint

Market forecasts say that over the next five years information-technology spending will be even more targeted toward cloud solutions. One of the branches of government that has tremendous potential to benefit from cloud is the Defense Department. While it moves cautiously with a slight uptick in its utilization of the commercial hyperscale cloud, there are many more ways the agency and warfighters could benefit from greater use of cloud technology.

While security concerns were a traditional obstacle to increased adoption, there have been substantial advancements over the past two years as cloud service providers have been approved and used for sensitive workloads throughout the government--including the Defense Department and the intelligence community, and other government entities around the world.

Security issues no longer dominate most of the meetings with knowledgeable senior defense officials. That isn't because they care about security any less, rather it's an acknowledgement that industry has come a long way in its understanding of cloud, and that accredited commercial clouds are now as --and even more--secure than on-premises options.

There is now widespread recognition in both the public and private sectors that commercial cloud options can be more secure than on-premises solutions. From health care companies like Philips and Bristol-Myers Squibb, to financial services entities like Capital One and Nasdaq, to agencies across the U.S. intelligence community, some of the most critical data is now being entrusted to the commercial cloud.

The key challenge in the Pentagon is rooted in how the cloud is defined and conceived. For example, a December 2015 DoD inspector general report found the Pentagon did not maintain a comprehensive list of cloud computing service contracts, in part because there was not an established department-wide definition for the technology.

Even today, both within the public and private sectors, the "cloud" is a somewhat nebulous term that can represent everything from a few server racks in a data center to multiple interconnected regions with millions of virtual servers.

Within a defense context, a collection of former data centers operating in a shared virtualized computing infrastructure environment can meet many of the very basic expectations of cloud. It can help reduce the operational and infrastructure costs of defense agencies and provide a foundation for interagency intelligence and data sharing...