Pentagon’s MilCloud 2.0 Could Host Classified Data by 2019

Fresh off receiving provisional authorization from the Defense Department to host its most sensitive unclassified data, milCloud 2.0 is closing in on another important milestone.

Donald Robinson, General Dynamics Information Technology’s chief technology officer, told reporters Wednesday the company expects its private cloud offering to achieve Impact Level 6 accreditation “towards the end of the year, or early next [calendar year],” which would allow it to begin hosting classified Defense Department workloads.

Currently, only a handful of other cloud service providers have achieved Impact Level 5 authorizations, including IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. AWS is the only cloud service provider to achieve Impact Level 6 accreditation.

In April, General Dynamics purchased CSRA, which last year won a $500 million contract with the Defense Department to build milCloud 2.0. The cloud was deployed ahead of schedule in February, and will soon see a dramatic increase in customers. As reported by Nextgov in early May, a memo signed by acting Chief Information Officer Essye Miller directed “fourth estate” agencies—mainly support agencies that aren't part of military departments—to migrate data and applications to milCloud 2.0 by 2020.

The memo dictates that data and apps stored across more than 100 data centers, from dozens of Defense support agencies, including the Defense Information Systems Agency, must migrate to milCloud 2.0.

The Pentagon’s focus on milCloud 2.0 comes as it is primed to release bids for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract. Another major contract, the Defense Enterprise Office Solution, will be bid out in the coming months and could be worth as much as $8 billion.