Cloud computing has burst recently into technology and business scene promising great technical and economic advantages, like offering On-demand provisioning of computer services, improved flexibility and scalability as well as reducing costs. Another attractive point of the cloud is its ability to enable a mobile workforce, which brings enhanced flexibility and efficiency. But cloud computing systems also provide attackers with new opportunities and can amplify the ability of the attacker to compromise the computing infrastructure.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has devised the following definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has unveiled a new Cloud Initiative to improve computing power and digital security by transferring many of its computing and storage functions onto the cloud. According to DoD chief information officer Dana Deasy, using the cloud will help to accelerate computing power, which in turn shortens the time taken for novel capabilities to reach deployed US warfighters.
Defense Department senior leaders have directed DoD to adopt cloud computing to support the warfighter, a direction that will become a pillar of the department’s strength and security, officials said. Officials of the Washington Headquarters Service in Alexandria, Va., announced a potential $10 billion ten-year contract to Microsoft in Oct2019 for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud project to for the company to provide modern, enterprise-level cloud services to DOD, based on an existing, large, globally available public offering.
The Defense Department is seeking an enterprise wide cloud infrastructure to ensure warfighters have access to real-time, mission-critical data, DoD officials said March 7 2018 at an industry day for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud acquisition. “This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department and providing the best resources to our men and women in uniform,” DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II said. “JEDI Cloud is just one contract and part of a much larger strategy for overall [information technology] efforts.”
Before the JEDI cloud contract, the DOD’s lack of a coordinated enterprise-level approach to cloud infrastructure has made it virtually impossible for U.S. warfighters and leaders to make critical data-driven decisions at mission-speed, DOD experts explain. A fragmented and largely on-premise computing and storage solution forces the warfighter into tedious data and application management processes, compromising their ability to rapidly access, manipulate, and analyze data at the home front and tactical edge.
Most importantly, current environments have not been optimized to support large, cross-domain analysis using advanced capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to meet warfighting needs and requirements.
Navy Rear Adm. Nancy A. Norton, DISA’s vice director, said the cloud will simplify and provide flexibility to the way DoD works with information that’s secure, rather than having many servers scattered around the globe for every command. You build a lake of information that you can pull from, and that’s a big benefit that helps with warfighting,” DISA’s director, Army Lt. Gen. Alan R. Lynn said. “If we need [a certain amount] of logistics to go here, and an amount of ammunition to go there, we’re now able to correlate all those different pieces at one time, which is very powerful for the warfighter.” The cloud has a second benefit in fiscal savings by using virtual equipment and hiring contractors to do the computing at a cheaper, at-scale rate, he said.
A third benefit is in virtual space, information can be moved around the network, Lynn said. “If you move them around the network, it’s hard to attack it,” he said “That’s when defense really starts kicking in.” Security of information on the cloud is No. 1, the general said. “We have the best security apparatus that tears through an attack that’s happening before it gets down to the user level,” he explained.
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