DISA officials say they continue to toe a line that so far isn’t well-defined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“There’s a line of demarcation where the contractor builds the bare metal [and] the hypervisor and below, and the government controls from above,” Stewart said. “What we’re exploring here is, where is that line of demarcation? Where’s the line for what’s the contractor’s responsibility and the government’s responsibility? Where each ends and each begins \u2014 where is that handshake?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s something that agencies across the government, not just at DoD, are trying to negotiate as they look to cloud’s promises of savings and efficiencies. At the center of the deliberations are the rules for buying commercial goods and services \u2014 the various and numerous directives and guidance that govern acquisition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Technically, this is not really cosmic. The hard part is the business aspect of it, the contracting aspect,” Stewart said, noting that DoD still is determining its strategy for milCloud, whether that means using a standalone indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery model, an existing governmentwide acquisition contract, a small business set-aside or something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We’re really hoping to get to an environment where we pay by the drink for our customers so that they’re not buying blocks, they’re not over-provisioning \u2014 they’re only paying for the use that they want to spend,” Stewart said. “If they want to use it for two weeks, that’s what they pay for…if they want to [use] it in perpetuity, they can do that as well. So these are challenges we’re facing right now: How do we make that work given the constraints that we have in the contracting and acquisition processes?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Government agencies and the cloud vendor community alike are watching closely to see DISA’s next moves with milCloud, especially how officials handle the storage and use of more highly classified \u2014 known as level 5 or level 6 \u2014 DoD data. For a long time, the only option for such sensitive information was the highly secured, non-commercial milCloud, but that’s changing, at least the non-commercial part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What we’re looking at doing is opening up our floor space and then enabling commercial providers to come in and offer their services from within inside the DoD perimeter,” Rob Vietmeyer, associate director for cloud computing and agile development in the enterprise services and integration directorate at the DoD CIO’s office, said in December. “It may be our floor space or [in some cases] it may just be within our network in their own facilities. But we are looking at dedicated implementation for these cloud services that we can then offer to the DoD community for our high-impact, mission-critical systems, level 5 and even level 6. In the classified environment we’re not going to be connected to the internet or other commercial infrastructures; we’re going to run that from fully private, dedicated Defense Department infrastructures.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Industry is jumping at the opportunity to provide high-security cloud for DoD \u2014 if they can pass the muster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":11,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2772],"class_list":["post-11475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disa","category-it-networks"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"RSV4T4HM5FCCJDLZ45YTGT3DD4","arc_canonical_url":"\/disa\/2016\/02\/24\/dod-opens-the-door-to-commercial-milcloud\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/default-c4isrnet.jpg.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"