The U.S. Military Can’t Wait For The Politics Of Cloud Contracting To Be Resolved (From RealClearDefense)

Cloud computing offers ways of making defense network operations faster, more agile, more responsive to emerging challenges and more effective. Until recently, the Department of Defense was moving forward with plans to migrate much of the military’s IT infrastructure to the cloud. Unfortunately, Washington politics has created roadblocks to the Pentagon’s efforts to leverage the richness of cloud computing for the military. Critics within the IT industry and on Capitol Hill generated a miasma of misinformation targeting one pending cloud computing effort, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. As a consequence of the barrage of criticism, the Pentagon is delaying the release of the JEDI request for proposal while it seeks to explain to Congress the rationale for its structure. Those responsible for near-term cloud computing contract efforts need to accelerate these efforts. I have written more about the Pentagon’s plans to more to the cloud for RealClearDefense here.