DISA cloud broker model faces hurdles

Grazed from FederalTimes.  Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

A year and a half since its designation as the Pentagon’s cloud service broker, the Defense Information Systems Agency is still working through the logistics of managing cloud services departmentwide.  More than 40requestshad been submitted to DISA for cloud services, said Jennifer Carter, DISA’s component acquisition executive. Of those, DISA has matched a dozen Defense Department customers with potential services to meet their cloud computing needs, including those offered by DISA and the private sector.

But only one of those arrangements has resulted in a contract award, according to DISA. The others are in various stages of the contracting process.  “As we move to what we would consider more full operational capability, we’ll be basically automating how we do that, and also working to establish more maturity on the cloud offerings that DISA has, as well,” Carter said of matching customers with cloud offerings…

One apparent challenge is that the qualified pool of commercial cloud services is slim.  Autonomic Resources’ Cloud Platform (ARC-P) is the only commercial cloud offering in DISA’s service catalog, which the agency uses to match customers with available services. The company’s solution was cleared by a joint board as having met governmentwide cloud security standards and received DoD approval for meeting its additional requirements…

Read more from the source @ http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20131213/ACQ02/312130011/DISA-cloud-broker-model-faces-hurdles