My first post in this series Cloud for the Military? I described how cloud computing can help overcome the hard challenges faced by defence organisations, concluding that it’s really a question of what kind of Cloud is going to be deployed when rather than *if*. I followed this with a short analysis of the most common blockages to military cloud adoption and how these could be overcome. I will now outline a recent success story – US Army Private Cloud II – and describe some practical first steps for a Defence organisation wishing to adopt Cloud.
Cloud technology lends itself to rapid development and innovation. Customers can try out software “as a service” and often for free to check that it meets their business needs. This makes “proof of concept” projects quick and easy. Table 1 outlines a few possible projects and the logical first steps in their realisation.
Table 1 – Projects & First Steps
The goal of US Army Private Cloud project was to provide Enterprise cloud computing services in support of the Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, Area Processing Centres (APC2). This multi-year project provided convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). These were rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Business benefits – which are typical of a private cloud rollout – included vastly reduced running costs, rapid transition from data centre to managed services (in months) and rapid recovery from unplanned outages.
References
- IBM Greenhouse (Connections hosting platform)
- Watson Analytics – powerful analytics as a service
- BlueMix Cloud Development Platform
Agree? Disagree? Disinterested? I welcome your feedback / participation preferably via this blog or by e-mail / telephone if you prefer.
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