Warfighters operate equipment at the lab located at Defense Information Systems Agency Headquarters at Fort Meade Md. (David Abizaid / Defense Information Systems Agency)
DoDIIS 2024 — By the beginning of next year, all four of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) providers will have reached Impact Level 6 (IL-6) security authorization, which deals with information classified Secret, as Google becomes the last to join the pack, a military official said Tuesday.
Having the four cloud service providers that can operate in the IL-6 environment is a “massive help” in JWCC’s development, according to Lt. Col. John Hall, who serves as the joint program lead for the JWCC at the Defense Information Systems Agency. He added that having all four at IL-6 will prevent any vendor lock.
“It allows you to get the right [cloud provider] for the job, and then potentially allows competition. So you know when they start to do things like rates, it gives you that capability,” he told Breaking Defense on the sidelines of the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems conference Tuesday. “So it’s been massively helpful to have four different [cloud providers]; it keeps [the vendors] honest too.”
The other three providers, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, already have authorization to operate on an IL-6 environment in the JWCC. IL-6 is reserved for the storage and processing of information classified up to the “Secret” level.
Migrating data to the JWCC has been on the top of the Pentagon’s to-do list since it announced the initiative in 2022. The contract is worth up to a collective $9 billion, and recently crossed the $1 billion mark in task orders back in September.
As the Pentagon continues its mass migration to the JWCC, it’s important for the department and its business partners to think of operating on the cloud as a fundamental part of one’s information technology architecture, Hall said during a breakout session Tuesday.
“Cloud should be something that is part of your larger IT infrastructure. I don’t think it is one or the other, [the cloud] should be built in to help you with your IT, services and delivery,” he said.
Hall later added that since the JWCC has multiple cloud providers, it should be seen as a “multi-cloud” option, versus a “multiple cloud” solution, because the different providers all need to work together if the JWCC is going to operate the way it is designed to as a singular destination for data.
“Thinking about how you integrate multiple different clouds is important, because if you think about them as siloed like, ‘This is my Google cloud; this is my AWS; this is my Microsoft; this is my Oracle,’ you’re not achieving the efficiencies that all of them will achieve together as a whole,” he said. “So I encourage everybody, when you look at these things, think of it as multi-cloud, not separate multiple standalone instances.”