DISA, Army mark enterprise e-mail progress with new milestone

Officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency on Aug. 21 announced a new milestone for the enterprise e-mail program: 500,000 Army accounts have been migrated to the cloud service.

In addition, roughly 20,000 other Defense Department users – including in the Joint Staff, U.S. European Command and within DISA – have also transitioned to enterprise e-mail, according to the agency.

“The DISA-Army partnership has been outstanding. The Army has been a dedicated partner in demonstrating the operational enhancements and efficiencies of DOD enterprise e-mail,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins Jr., DISA director, said in a DISA release. “Enterprise email lays the foundation for implementation of other enterprise services, and it brings us a step closer to a true Defense enterprise information infrastructure that enables warfighters to connect, identify themselves, discover and share information and collaborate throughout the full spectrum of military operations.”

DISA officials have said more than a million Army users will eventually be on the system, with migration of Army accounts expected to wrap up in March 2013.

Enterprise e-mail is expected to save the Army $76 million in fiscal 2013 and $380 million through 2017, according to a report the Army CIO/G-6 submitted to Congress earlier this year. However, that report also revealed that Army officials initially had overstated the program’s savings by nearly 25 percent, with earlier estimates in the range of saving $100 million per year.

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The enterprise e-mail program has hit stumbling blocks along the way, including technical glitches that temporarily halted operations and threats from Congress to take away funding. There have also been doubts as to if and when the other DOD services would join; nonetheless, Army and DISA officials have remained confident.

“The end-state for us is a joint information enterprise. We will never deploy the Army as a standalone force ever again. We’ll always have our sister services with us; we’ll always have coalition partners. We must be able to connect to them, and we’ve got to train like we fight. You’re seeing more of this with the combined posts and stations,” Maj. Gen. Steven Smith, director of the Army CIO/G-6 cyber directorate, said in April. “This is the environment. This is the end-state ... but we have a lot of work to do to get to that point.”