There’s no telling when the Defense Department might finally have its JEDI Cloud up and running. But the Army’s not waiting around for it.
Instead, service IT leaders say they’re already beginning to build cloud architectures of their own that can reach from the office to the tactical edge — a major change to the Army’s fundamental technology infrastructure that is also likely to force it to rethink other aspects of its IT enterprise, including how it buys and develops software.
The Army’s ambitions are embedded in the very name of the new organization the service stood up earlier this year to guide its cloud activities: The Enterprise Cloud Management Office (ECMO). Officials said even though the Army has been consuming cloud services for years — both government ones and commercial ones — there was a clear need to synchronize those activities and scale them across the entire service.