WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army will roll out a contract worth as much as $1 billion this fiscal year to spur the service’s migration to cloud-based computing.
The U.S. Army requested $16.6 billion in cyber and information technology funding for fiscal 2023, or more than 9% of the service’s $178 billion budget blueprint.
“Right now, what’s happening is even when we have commands that want to move to the cloud, today there is not one contract that they can go to,” he said. “So they are doing a lot of shopping. They’ve got to go to multiple contracting centers to go find the right vehicle, and then when they go there, it takes them nine months before they actually get on contract.”
That timeline is too long and that process too clunky, Lyer said. Under EAMM, the intent is to slash the time it takes to award task orders to four weeks.
Lyer’s office will spearhead the effort alongside the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, which provides oversight for all of the service’s cloud processes and activities. Operating under the Headquarters Department of the Army, Chief Information Office, ECMA ensures a full unity of effort, in identification of seven strategic imperatives, such as Expand cloud, Implement Zero Trust architecture, Enable secure, rapid software development Accelerate data-driven decisions etc. The agency is led by Paul Puckett.
“It’s no longer just telling the commands, ‘Hey, you got to go figure it out,’” Lyer said. “We’re really kind of holding their hand to help them migrate their applications in the cloud, all the way from architecting it, working through migrating the data, the contract vehicle, and so on.”
The Army considers cloud migration and widespread, secure use foundational to the grander modernization of its networks, computers and collaboration. The Army’s updated cloud plan was unveiled this month, weeks after the service’s top uniformed information technology official, Lt. Gen. John Morrison, described the coming year as one of “action and acceleration” and “much more rapid movement to the cloud.”
The Army requested $16.6 billion in cyber and IT funding for fiscal 2023, which started Oct. 1, or more than 9% of the service’s $178 billion budget blueprint. Hundreds of millions, officials said, would be invested in cloud.
