DISA looking at ‘retooling’ Stratus cloud offering

The Defense Information Systems Agency plans to enhance its private cloud offering as it looks to give mission partners better options to work together in the cloud, according to a senior leader.

Pentagon officials have strongly encouraged Defense Department components to use a public cloud environment known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). But while JWCC had its advantages, it’s not always the best fit for all workloads, noted Jeff Marshall, acting director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center.

JWCC is the Pentagon’s high-priority enterprise cloud effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded contract spots under the $9 billion JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders.

“Whenever anyone talks about cloud and what DISA offers for cloud services, everyone first thinks of JWCC. However, now that it’s been out there for a while it’s time for us to start looking at, is public cloud the right vehicle for every workload?” Marshall said at an event Tuesday hosted by Defense One.

DISA has a hybrid-cloud broker office and officials are looking at customers’ needs rather than approaching it from a one-size-fits-all perspective.

“Maybe they’re already in AWS or Microsoft or Oracle or Google, and they’re realizing that for performance reasons, for data ingress/egress reasons and for security and compliance reasons, maybe not all of their workload actually fits there anymore. And so now what we’re doing is we’re taking a more holistic approach and we’re looking at cloud as a hybrid cloud environment,” Marshall said. “We’re finding that sometimes JWCC and the public clouds is the right space for their workload, but at other times, we find that it’s actually private cloud in our Stratus offering that’s the right workload.”

According to DISA, Stratus provides a multi-tenant, self-service management capability for compute, storage and network infrastructure, including an on-demand web-based portal where customers can manage their resources.

The adoption of Stratus across the department is currently “going OK,” Marshall said.

However, as Defense Department components flock to public cloud offerings such as JWCC, agency officials are looking at ways to improve Stratus to meet the needs of users.

“We’re actually right now, we’re looking at a prototype of retooling it and making it a better private cloud offering to where if you do need boundaries that the public cloud can’t provide you, if you do need performance that you can’t get from there, and if you do need white-glove service you can’t get. And so what we’re doing with Stratus is we’re actually looking at now prototyping a refresh of the infrastructure, and with that, it’s going to be able to give us the ability, within the next year or two, to be able to offer the same set of parameters that we can offer you with JWCC. So we’re going to be able to give you scalability, elasticity and metering within that. So we’re there,” Marshall said.

“We’re moving into that space, and we’re now starting to use the hybrid cloud broker office to go out to mission partners and get that demand signal to try and understand what do you have out there and is it where it should be? Let us help you figure that out. Let us help you determine the metrics around that. And then when it’s ready, we can bring the workloads in that probably should be in a private environment for [various] reasons,” he said.

There are several reasons why it might make more sense in some cases for DOD users to pick a private cloud, according to Marshall.

For example, sometimes the performance needs of mission partners’ workloads are very high.

“It’s a huge database that requires a lot of activity, a lot of moving parts and a lot of infrastructure to support. While JWCC offers those things within the contracts, sometimes mission partners realize that they get very expensive very quickly — beyond what they are willing to pay for. And in those cases, we can generally offer that at a bit better discount for the big items,” he said.

Supportability is another issue. Support from big cloud service providers can come at a tiered cost, Marshall said.

“It gets more expensive for the mission partner, and so when they require a really high level of monitoring, of capacity watch, of just supportability and oversight of whatever that workload is and what it’s on, that’s another use case where we can do it better on a private cloud environment, because we can do what we call white-glove service and really give them a high level of high touch on that,” he added.

Marshall also cited security as a concern that might lead customers to prefer something like Stratus.

“While the CSPs do a great job in that space, sometimes there’s just one or two things that the mission partner is not overly happy about. And so in those cases, bringing it back into a private cloud within our own data centers, on our equipment allows us to better secure it for them,” he said.