$450M Cloud Contract Stalled Due to DOD Concerns Over Demand
The article titled DOD Says “No Mas” On Commercial Cloud, Puts Brakes on $450M Contract on Ars Technica has some concerned that the government is rethinking its commitment to the cloud. Scott Stewart, contracting officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) explained the decision was caused by a lack of demand from the Defense Department.
The article explains:
“The contract, for which the DISA began drafting a request for proposals this summer, would have picked up to 10 cloud providers to supply Internet-accessible file storage, database hosting, Web hosting, and virtual servers—allowing the military to offload public, non-sensitive systems from its own infrastructure. As it turns out, the various military services and other DOD agencies that the DISA serves aren’t terribly interested in doing that. The federal government… has been trying to reduce the number of public-facing websites it maintains.”
It is yet to be determined whether the contract is being adjusted to meet the more modest requirements or scrapped entirely. As mentioned in the quote, this is not the only instance of concerns of overspending. In 2011 the White House froze all creation of new websites. In the meantime, the military has been dealing with security issues that have caused them to rely on DISA’s data centers.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Phi Beta Iota: Army Cyber cannot handle a tinyurl (all documents with this standard convenience are blocked, thus reducing all Army and NDU productivity by at least 30%). DoD Cyber has no clue at all and will need at least a decade to recover from the irresponsibility and ignorance of NSA/Cyber Command as well as the legacy of DISA trying to do the wrong things righter at ever greater expense with ever lessening utility. We have substituted bad proprietary technology for open thinking to the nth degree. DoD yber's incompetence is a tiny microcosm of DoD abject emptiness across strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations (heroic at the human level, corrupt at every other level). We can do better.
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Robert Garigue at Phi Beta Iota
