Thursday, March 20, 2014

MILCLOUD AND THE MAINTENANCE OF DOD APPLICATIONS

FROM:  DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY 
DISA now offers milCloud, a cloud-service portfolio, featuring an integrated suite of capabilities designed to drive agility into the development, deployment and maintenance of DoD applications.

milCloud leverages a combination of mature commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and government-developed technology to deliver cloud services tailored to needs of the DoD. The benefits of milCloud include cost savings, more flexibility and control for the mission partner to manage resources and control their computing environment, and greater security in the processing and storage of classified and controlled unclassified information.

milCloud is a component of the DoD Enterprise Cloud Environment, and is a foundational Joint Information Environment, Core Data Center offering.  milCloud’s infrastructure is maintained within DoD core data centers (CDCs) that incorporate strict security protocols.

The portfolio will aid the DoD to deliver the most innovative, efficient, and secure information and information technology (IT) services in support of the department’s mission; anywhere, anytime, on any authorized device.

All products in the milCloud portfolio feature the following cloud services characteristics:

On-Demand Self-Service: milCloud consumers can place orders on-demand through web-based self-service tools, configure infrastructure resources where appropriate, and manage their mission application lifecycle running on those resources without manual intervention from DISA support staff.
Broad Network Access: All milCloud products and services have network connectivity to the Department of Defense Information Networks (DoDIN) and are configured in accordance with relevant DoD security guidelines and approved protocols.
Resource Pooling: milCloud resources are pooled so that multiple mission partners consume units from pools provisioned by DISA, enabling efficient use of aggregate resources and greater consumption flexibility.
Rapid Elasticity: The milCloud portfolio has the ability to expand or contract resource use within virtual resource pools.

With milCloud, the mission partner maintains control and flexibility. milCloud features a shared, virtualized computing infrastructure environment known as a virtual data center (VDC). The VDC is “virtual floor space” and logically analogous to an enclave in a physical datacenter in which mission partners can manage compute, store, and network resources as required to support their systems. Consumption of computing resources within the VDC is enabled via a self-service, on-demand, web-based, management interface that enables mission partners to order, provision, and directly manage their VDC resources.

DISA requires that VDCs are under explicit responsibility and accountability of the mission partner’s Designated Approving Authority (DAA). Mission partner DAAs, or their designates, must endorse a Certificate of Risk Assessment (CORA) to formally accept information assurance accountability.

Resources can be configured within a VDC and managed by the mission partner with a high degree of flexibility and self-service control or resources can be configured automatically by milCloud’s Orchestrator.

milCloud’s Orchestrator can streamline and automate the management of functions related to building, testing, and migrating of configurations in a VDC. A mission partner can use available “recipes” or create a recipe of assets, such as virtual machines, software packages and configuration scripts. The milCloud Orchestrator executes the recipe on mission partner demand.

milCloud Orchestrator also automates numerous labor intensive and repetitive activities such as functional regression testing following changes to an application. Environment recipes can also be published as baselines and/or minimum system requirements. Mission partner administrators have control over how recipes are shared and made available to other users in milCloud.

milCloud includes Level II/Tier I thru III support 24/7 through a central service desk, ensuring mission partners receive support and information assurance when they need it.

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