Night court and the cloud

The Army's zero-based budgeting approach turned up extra money – including funds to support cloud adoption, according to Army CIO Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford.

Speaking at an industry conference Jan. 21, Crawford credited the night court budgeting process for making possible $730 million in cloud and data investments through fiscal 2023.

"As an example of one of the outpourings of night court," Crawford said at AFCEA NOVA's Army IT Day, "we were able to get resources to actually fund through the [future years defense program] where we're going to spend about $730 million between now and FY 2023 on the data cloud effort."

The Army recently stood up its enterprise cloud program office which aims to facilitate migrations across the service. The Army is now looking for "early adopters" for upcoming JEDI migrations, which are set to roll out the first iterations of unclassified capabilities by Feb. 11, Crawford said.

The CIO's comments back up those of the Army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, who told reporters Jan. 15 the night court process was here to stay. McCarthy also said that for the 2021 budget more "refinements" and fewer large cuts were made.

The Army's cloud push is to largely support multi-domain operations, which Crawford described as for any "near real-time access" for any sensor, any shooter, any command and control ability.

"That's a monumental task. But we can't do that without harvesting our data, divesting of legacy applications and then moving the data that's most important and authoritative into a cloud environment," the CIO said.