Defense Department Seeks ‘Rapid Cloud Migration’ Ideas for MilCloud

The Defense Department’s technical arm wants to see what capabilities exist in the marketplace to improve the migration of data and applications to milCloud 2.0, the Pentagon’s on-premise cloud.

On Wednesday, the Defense Information Systems Agency issued a request for information to industry seeking input on “rapid cloud migration” as it aims to understand capabilities relevant to “automated cloud migration techniques.”

The RFI, which does not constitute a solicitation but could lead to one-on-one discussions with vendors, comes three months after Pentagon memo directed all “fourth-estate” defense agencies to migrate all data and applications to milCloud 2.0 by 2020. In the interim, the Office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer had planned to coordinate with affected agencies, including DISA, to plan their cloud migrations.

MilCloud 2.0 went live earlier this year as part of a three-year, $500 million contract won by CSRA, which has since been purchased by defense contractor General Dynamics.

The RFI makes clear the Pentagon’s current migration strategy, which includes “manual cloning and conversion of server images, which are then provisioned, into the new cloud environment, or provisioning, building and configuring applications on virtual servers from scratch,” is not sufficient.

“This RFI seeks migration solutions that can accurately duplicate the suite of servers used with an application from their current environment into a cloud environment built on Apache CloudStack technology and KVM hypervisor,” the RFI states. “The scope of duplication includes all applications used with the system, configuration of network and network security controls when proper APIs are exposed, and identification of interactions within the application system and to external systems when needed network traffic is made available for analysis.”

Options, the RFI says, could include the “use of vendor-provided tools or analytic capabilities if packet captures, or other network monitoring information.”

Industry responses must be received by Sept. 10.