HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. – Cloud One, chartered by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, paved the way for the Department of the Air Force to become a leader in cloud hosting.
The multi-cloud, multi-vendor system is a one-stop shop for Department of Defense mission application owners requiring commercial cloud services. It delivers speed, scalability, and security with cutting-edge technologies, approaches, and solutions for cloud computing.
“Since its creation, in my opinion, it has changed the game,” Lt. Col. Beau Brantley, Cloud One lead engineer, said. “Cloud One made work more efficient for airmen. It is a trailblazer for cloud computing in the Department of Defense.”
Cloud One offers a secured government cloud service pre-enabled to meet defense security requirements and zero-trust compliance.
“We do more than host,” Brantley stated. “We also facilitate migrations to ensure applications are set up in the cloud. Cloud One was established for affordability and security, that saves rework by only setting up the platform once.”
The program offers data transport services and monitoring, secure cloud computing architecture, compute and store monitoring, global content delivery service, mobile connect, inheritable risk management framework controls for the authority to operate, platform operations, and sustainment.
“Cloud One implements guardrails that safeguard applications so the adversary cannot take advantage as we migrate applications to the cloud,” Brantley said. “We have a 100% success rate.”
It is designed to provide secure computing environments, standardized platforms, application migration, in addition to data management at classified and unclassified levels.
“Cloud One is a result of DOD systems requiring us to move to the cloud,” Joseph Thorp, program manager, Cloud One, said. “It is more efficient, more secure and more cost-effective to migrate applications to the cloud via Cloud One.”
The program operates on four cloud service providers, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform. It offers single-tenant and multi-tenant common computing environments with unparalleled scalability and cutting-edge services.
Applications migrating to Cloud One undergo application analysis so the team can work with customers to identify the cloud service provider best suited to support them.
“What differentiates Cloud One is the number of cloud service providers we use,” Brantley said. “Every application has different requirements, and the option to select from multiple cloud service providers helps us cater to those requirements.”
The program averages 25 to 30 new systems per year. The objective, Thorp said, is to accelerate migration.
“One hundred to 150 application migrations per year is the objective,” he added. “We need to increase the number of applications migrating to the cloud. This will be improved with our dedicated customer service team adding value to the overall experience. Moving systems to the cloud will help protect our most critical workloads against significant adversaries.”
The Cloud One team recently celebrated its 150th application migration milestone.
“We are looking to double the current rate of application migration as the U.S. Air Force optimizes for Great Power Competition,” Thorp said.
Lt. Col. Matthew Kauffmann, materiel leader, Compute and Store Branch, said, “the roots of the program stem from a data center in Montgomery, Alabama, supporting approximately two dozen applications on premise.”
Kauffmann said the standardized cybersecurity platform minimizes the attack surface, safeguarding applications against threats.
“It is a way to address vulnerabilities when they arrive,” Kauffmann said. “We have a block at the boundary providing time to patch issues and keep applications running.”
Former Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger signed a memorandum in June 2021 mandating Cloud One to be utilized to migrate workloads to the cloud. Current Air Force CIO Venice Goodwine prioritized this initiative, accelerating the rate of cloud adoption.
Greater cloud usage enables the DOD to efficiently keep pace with technology developments and utilize a virtualized service with greater agility and flexibility to address demand and respond to security incidents.
“Cloud One can host any application with secret and below workloads,” Brantley said. “This is not just for the Air Force. We have the ability to support applications from across all services as Cloud One has proven to be effective.”
Supporting the accelerated pace is Operation Swift Shield, a Cloud One modernization initiative designed to increase a mission system’s ability to deliver applications faster. The program’s team is also expanding geographically by migrating into a multi-region format.
“We will be located in multiple regions for redundancy to prevent service disruption,” Brantley said. “We are moving to the cloud for the same reason the rest of the world is.
“When the U.S. Air Force chose this path, it was not guaranteed it would work to this scale. Cloud One proves it is sustainable and affordable.”
The program has two migration paths, migration as a service and hybrid, in addition to a dedicated 24/7 support team and multiple cybersecurity packages that applications can inherit due to the standardized platform, if an authorizing official signs off.
“On Cloud One, you can inherit 30 to 40% of that package,” Kauffmann said. “This saves the customer 40% of cybersecurity work. For those using Operation Swift Shield it will be up to 70 to 80%.
Cloud One represents innovation in reliability and scalability, ensuring data is no longer restricted to a single footprint.
“We’ve created a worldwide community that has dwarfed it,” Kauffmann said. “Our vision is getting the warfighter data at any time, any place, and that is what we strive for every day. “We are pacesetters and partners who want to gain from lessons learned.”
For more information visit: https://cloudone.af.mil. Mission systems interested in onboarding applications can register for a Cloud One one-on-one engagement call.
Further questions can be sent to: AFLCMC.HNII.CloudOneKickstart@us.af.mil