Pentagon Completes First App Migration to MilCloud 2.0
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By
Frank Konkel
The Defense Department is beginning to move applications to its milCloud 2.0, its next-generation on premise cloud solution.
Fresh off an order from the Defense Department’s then-chief information officer to migrate “fourth estate” data and applications to milCloud 2.0, the Pentagon has successfully completed its first application migration.
Forge.mil, an application managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency, became the Defense Department application with a production environment hosted in the on-premise infrastructure-as-a-service offering operated by defense contractor General Dynamics Information Technology.
The application is one of 54 agency-owned applications DISA is currently migrating to milCloud 2.0 from the fourth estate—those defense agencies that do not fall under military departments. Those applications would join more than 1,100 workloads in milCloud 2.0, according to program manager Caroline Bean.
In a press statement issued Dec. 20, Bean said officials have learned many lessons they plan to share across the Defense Department to expedite future migrations.
“We have lots of lessons learned, which we are sharing with the ‘fourth estate’ and we’re working closely with the DOD CIO to do that,” Bean said. “We’ve been trailblazing a lot of this effort, and as a consequence, we’ve had to sort of do some of these steps over again, but we’re using our team’s experience to help DISA nail down the most efficient way to do a lot of this.”
Forge.mil’s migration to the new cloud environment was made easier because it was already virtualized for migration to milCloud 1.0, the Pentagon’s previous on-premise cloud solution.
“Forge didn’t have to go through a lot of application rationalization because we are already in milCloud 1.0,” said Forge.mil Lead Engineer Dr. Benjamin Willett. “We did a machine ‘lift and shift,’ a direct copy from one to the other.”
In total, it took about six months for Forge.mil to go through the full migration process, but officials said a range of improvements—especially regarding the technical exchange of information—should reduce migration times significantly for the next applications in line.