US Army pushes cloud expansion to regional commands

US Army document detailing the service's three-tier strategy to integrate the hybrid cloud capability into army operations. (US Army )

US Army officials are preparing to move out on a plan to expand the ground service's burgeoning cloud computing capabilities beyond the continental United States (CONUS), with service leaders anticipating integration of those capabilities into the regional commands, beginning with the Asia-Pacific region.

The plan is part of the army's plan to rapidly transition from legacy combat networking strategies to a mix of commercial and military cloud capabilities, as outlined under the service's Unified Network strategy issued in October 2021. Service-led efforts to adopt this commercial-military hybrid cloud strategy has shown early promise, Army Chief Information Officer Raj Ayer said in June.

Most recently, army officials were able to migrate 50 service-specific applications from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)-hosted military cloud service provider to the army variant – known as the cArmy cloud – within 100 days, according to Ayer.

“These were not websites. These were large mission critical applications that support the soldier, day in and day out, and without a blip we were able to move these seamlessly,” he said during an army networking forum held by the Potomac Officers Club in Virginia.

“This is the kind of speed and agility that we need moving forward”, referring to the recent mass migration of applications into the army cloud, Ayer added. The effort, he noted, has now set the “gold standard” for how service officials plan to approach future technology migration into the army cloud.