Supporting DOD mission success with robust and secure cloud

The Defense Department is moving ahead quickly on adopting cloud computing to deliver enterprise cloud capabilities from the continental United States to the tactical edge. That effort is critical in executing the Defense Department’s Joint All Domain Command and Control strategy, as DOD chief information officer John Sherman made clear to legislators early this year.

But getting the right capabilities in the cloud is critical, says Derek Strausbaugh, mission team leader for the Department of Defense at Microsoft Federal, in a recent podcast produced by Scoop News Group for DefenseScoop and underwritten by Microsoft Federal.

Strausbaugh shared that the questions he often hears about deploying a secure classified cloud computing environment mostly revolve around authorization, access and capability.

This involves understanding who authorized different types of classified information to be supported in selected clouds, who has access to that information or environment, and what capabilities can be implemented in clouds at different access levels.

“Classified programs are just by their very nature used to limitations in terms of getting access to commercial capabilities…and a lot of that is understandable because of the risk posture of these networks and what they protect,” shared Strausbaugh.

This is why Microsoft considered a different approach to building out their secret and top-secret clouds, he explained.

“First is capability. So, having access to a cloud with a commitment to parity with commercial services. Also, performance and having the most direct path to connecting to our cloud or using our cloud within the classified community,” he elaborated. “And then access. How do we make the Azure Clouds built for secret and top-secret workloads accessible to the users in these classified cloud communities?”

He touches on an example of the edge compute projects they are working on, ensuring that the tactical community and operational teams have an enterprise component and can take the cloud component with them when they go out into the field.

Learn more about how defense organizations can build robust cloud capabilities to support mission activities.

Listen to the entire podcast conversation on FedScoop.com. And hear more of our latest coverage on IT developments across the federal government by subscribing to The DefenseScoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and Stitcher.

This podcast was produced by Scoop News Group, for DefenseScoop, and underwritten by Microsoft.