Deasy discusses DOD cloud considerations

After just over a week on the job, Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy spoke on his priorities for the organization and why the DOD needs a "world-class" cloud environment at the AFCEA Defense Cyber Operations Symposium.

And the May 17 Baltimore event, Deasy listed cybersecurity, big data and artificial intelligence as three drivers of innovation at DOD. "There's going to be a cloud that sits at the foundation, allowing you to build up any of these things. And it's going to have to run on a world-class environment," he said.

"Cloud can do different things for you, it can be an infrastructure, it can be a platform, it can be software- as-a-service. And each of those has its own permutations, its own challenges," he said, adding that it's important to think of cloud migrations as an opportunity to re-engineer legacy tech rather than simply planting it in a new environment.

Deasy's comments seemed to allude to DOD's planned Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, a massive, single-award enterprise cloud plan to support combat and warfighting activity. But while JEDI has garnered congressional scrutiny, Deasy stayed away from the topic, instead focusing on the broader necessity of cloud solutions that ensure DOD has the best capabilities to fulfill its missions.

"Cloud is one of the most iterative things that I've ever been involved with," Deasy said of his nearly 37 years working in the tech industry. "There's not a singular thing that cloud is…And so one of the things I find you have to do early on is you got to get clear what conversation you're in, what you're talking about."