Defense Logistics Agency Making Rapid Progress in Cloud Migration
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By
Mila Jasper
A DLA official said the agency moved apps to the cloud close to six weeks ahead of schedule.
The Defense Department component charged with managing the global supply chain to deliver combat logistics support migrated five applications to the cloud nearly six weeks faster than originally anticipated, according to an official.
The Defense Logistics Agency moved the five apps to the cloud in 138 days, Adarryl Roberts, DLA’s program executive officer, said during Amazon Web Services’ Public Sector Summit Thursday.
“Our on-premise systems had been experiencing outages and delays in deployments, and our team didn’t have direct access, which created challenges and hindered our ability to resolve issues quickly,” Roberts said. “So we embarked on a digital business transformation journey, beginning with our decision to modernize with the cloud for a more agile development framework that provides the flexibility needed to drive rapid performance and scale.”
The five applications were migrated to the cloud under the Procurement Integrated Enterprise Environment, Roberts said. PIEE is a common operating environment that serves as the “DoD and federal one-stop-shop for procurement capabilities,” according to DLA’s website.
DOD announced in February CACI Enterprise Solutions and Tritus Technologies were awarded a shared indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $34 million to provide PIEE COE support services including analysis for software design and development, solution integration, and application sustainment.
DLA currently has 85% of its applications running the cloud and plans to finish migrating all of them in the next few years, Roberts said. One app supporting COVID-19 vaccine distribution will make the transition “later this year,” he added.
“We got all necessary parties together across procurement and cybersecurity when making the decision to move to the cloud, allowing us to align on the 'how' and 'why' from the very beginning,” Roberts said of the factors contributing to the speed of the migration. “Another is that we established accreditation for the entire environment instead of each individual application, helping to increase our cybersecurity efficiencies.”