A MAP TO MIGRATION
officer [CIO], to consider a ‘cloud first’ mentality, as DOD and Army wanted to get out of owning data centers and having to manage them.”
Migration to a cloud environment enables organizations to consolidate infrastructure, rapidly scale as needed, and reduce duplicated services while reducing hosting and maintenance costs, improving continuity of operations, and increasing security through centralized control and access authorization. Why buy and manage a mountain of servers when you can essentially rent them on demand and forego the maintenance expenses? Tat’s the infrastructure-as-a-service model, in a nutshell. “Te whole premise behind cloud is that you get what you pay for, and you only pay for what you use,” Poole said. “But we didn’t have yet any metrics to show what we were actually going to consume.” And that was just one of the hurdles along the way.
FOGGY GUIDANCE Te organization had its goal—move its systems and its more than 40,000 users to the cloud. But the directions were less than clear. Tey began following the as-then-defined Army process, which was still being developed. “Our CAMP and CAPPMIS system was in the sustainment phase, so we had to provide the maintenance and sustainment, and also carry out the directive of moving to the cloud. We wanted to use the Army-defined process and help to create that map to share our experiences with others,” Poole said. “We were all working together to figure things out, and leaning on each other to define them.”
Poole said that he and the USAASC team encountered two particularly difficult challenges during the migration effort. First, the Army and DOD’s testing and standards had not yet caught up to the technology in question. Security guidelines for an Army-owned data center are simply not compatible with commercial cloud computing processes. Second, many of the personnel responsible for inspecting and certifying Army infor- mation systems had never worked with cloud systems before. “We found that we were sort of talking past each other at times,” Poole said. “Because there was no real defined process of what was
USAASC worked with stakeholders across DOD and the Army to create a sustainable transition to the cloud environment.
96 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2021
A MIGRATION TIMELINE
USAASC’s migration to a commercial cloud environ- ment spanned several years, in total. The following are key milestones:
June 2014—Secretary of the Army directed the migration of Army enterprise systems and applica- tions to core data centers.
July 2015—The Army CIO/G-6 provided guidance for the migration of enterprise applications to the commercial cloud.
October 2015—USAASC completed the migration survey provided by Army Application Migration Busi- ness Office (AAMBO).
November 2015—AAMBO delivered version 1.0 of its migration assessment and rough order of magnitude (ROM) of the CAMP environment and recommended that it move to the Defense Informa- tion Systems Agency hosting services.
February 2016—USAASC requested assistance from Acquisition Management Support Solutions (AMS2) to leverage their migration efforts for an anal- ysis of alternatives and proof of concept to validate AAMBO’s recommendation.
April 2016—Analysis of alternatives started.
February 2017—Microsoft Azure proof of concept developed.
April 2018—Cost-benefit analysis approved by HQDA CIO/G-6. USAASC allocated funding to complete its migration.
June 2018—Upon receipt of funding for the
migration, USAASC engaged with AMS2 to initiate the effort.
July 2018—Amazon Web Services (AWS) environ- ment established.
January 2019—Initiated AWS hosting service contract
February 2020—Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service package workflow initiated.
March 2020—Authority to operate received. April 2020—Go live.
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