DISA’s overseas cloud efforts gain JOEmentum in Europe

The Defense Information Systems Agency is setting up its Joint Operational Edge (JOE) capability in Germany as DISA moves to further expand its cloud offerings outside the continental United States, according to a senior official.

The JOE effort started in 2023, and the technology has already been put in place at key U.S. military hubs in the Asia-Pacific. DISA is also moving forward with another initiative to deploy the Stratus private cloud at overseas locations.

“OCONUS cloud is both a vehicle for the public cloud to have a joint operational edge — which we call JOE — and there’s also OCONUS Stratus, which we have out in the Pacific, and we also now are just about done with deploying in Europe,” Jeff Marshall, acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Defense One.

“The whole concept is real simple. As you’re in a region outside of the continental United States, you start to have network latency in getting to your data … and you start to see performance drag with the things that you’re trying to accomplish. And when you’re talking about mission partners with mission-critical activities going on in the Pacific or in Europe, you really can’t have those performance degradations. So what these products allow the mission partners to do is actually host their most critical applications closer to them, [with] less latency, and they’re able to get their missions accomplished,” he said.

In June, then Defense Department CIO John Sherman told DefenseScoop in an exit interview that a JOE cloud capability was being set up in Hawaii, another was coming online next in Japan, and the Pentagon was looking at sites in Europe.

It appears that progress has been made on that front.

“We have it deployed in a location and it’s up and running in Hawaii. We’re deploying and it’s in the process of getting prototype workloads on it, and that one is going into Japan. And then we’re also deploying it right now and getting it set up for mission partner prototyping in Europe and out of Germany,” Marshall said.

Hawaii, Japan and Germany each host large U.S. military bases with tens of thousands of personnel and are key overseas hubs for the Defense Department.

Stratus is also up and running in Hawaii and Air Force personnel are already using it, according to Marshall.

While Stratus is a private cloud, JOE is related to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) offering, which is a public cloud.

In December 2022, cloud service providers Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program and are competing for task orders.

“JOE is specific to the JWCC public cloud … contract,” Marshall said. “We’re going to have them set up for each CSP, and once that is going to accomplish mission-critical workloads that work best closer to the mission partners outside of the continental United States, we’ll be able to push them out to those nodes, and then the mission partners will be able to utilize that data quicker.”

Although these cloud initiatives aren’t yet connected to the tactical mission partner environment that the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is setting up to boost interoperability with allies, that is a possibility, Marshall suggested.

“It will be eventually. One of the things that is on our DISA Next strategy, as well as the Fulcrum strategy from DOD, is how to better integrate with mission partner environments as well as coalition environments. So this does allow that to be set up so that we can use those as start points for those types of environments as policy comes out around that, that we can then deploy infrastructure in support of,” he said.