The Pentagon is telling all of the military solutions and agencies that it's time for them to cease operating their own e mail servers and computer software, and to draw up plans inside the next couple of months to move to the DoDwide enterprise e-mail system.
Up till now, the Pentagon has been content material to let the solutions and agencies make their own decisions on when and no matter whether to move to the method, operated in a private cloud by the Defense Info Systems Agency. But no additional.
In a memo to the leaders of DoD elements late final week, DoD chief data officer Teri Takai told officials they have 120 days to draw up plans to migrate their existing e mail infrastructure to enterprise e-mail.
The directive, which also officially designated the email capability as a DoD enterprise service below the department's mandated enterprise architecture, is element of the Pentagon's broader push to shut down service-centric IT capabilities and turn them into typical departmentwide solutions. The military is progressively evolving toward a requirements-primarily based computing idea recognized as the the Joint Details Environment (JIE).
http://enterprise-email.org/upgrading-from-an-email-only-account/
No excuses permitted
And when it comes to email, there will be no escape clauses for the military solutions, said Lt. Gen. Mark Bowman, the CIO for the military's Joint Employees and one particular of the three co-chairmen of the JIE executive committee. He said it is one of many enterprise initiatives the oversight body is tracking closely in every DoD element.
http://army.com/ako
"[Transitioning to JIE] requires holding individuals accountable. The ideal way to do that is to get started handing out report cards and start briefing them to the leaders," he told an audience at AFCEA Northern Virginia's annual Joint Warfighter IT Day in Vienna, Va. "Some men and women are coming to me and saying, 'Hey, I do not like the way our scorecard appears.' OK, do what you require to do to turn green then."
The Army, which helped DISA pioneer the enterprise e mail service, is by far its biggest user and finished migrating most of the service's 1.five million customers final month. The Navy and Marine Corps meanwhile have expressed reluctance to make the switch, with leaders saying they currently get a lot more capability for much less cash under the current Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. But Bowman, who served in the Army CIO's workplace prior to his Joint Employees assignment, stated not even the Army has managed to earn a "green" score on its JIE report card for the enterprise e mail category.
"They never plan on transitioning West Point and they do not plan on transitioning the Corps of Engineers," he mentioned. "The Army was pounding on me yesterday, saying, 'We're green. We've moved everyone we want to.' If I gave them a green for that, everyone else would use that as the exact same justification for why they are not going to do any much more than they currently have. We are operating plans appropriate now for how all these organizations comply in all these different places. Some of them are federally-directed and presidentially-mandated, but these are the factors that lead us to the JIE."
Two deadlines set
The DoD CIO memo requires military elements to start off migrating to the enterprise email no later than the initially quarter of 2015. Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, DISA's director, told reporters his agency will be ready to serve the whole military.
"We have the capability to scale to 4.five million users ideal now," he said. "We've got 1.5 million appropriate now in between the Army, DISA, the Joint Employees, the [Workplace of the Secretary of Defense] staff and a range of other users that are out there. What I was told to do was to build out the architecture, and I've offered a thumbs- up and said we're prepared to go."
As with the broader push toward JIE, the Pentagon believes the single email system will boost security, enhance collaboration involving military components and minimize general IT charges. And officials think the cultural shift it needs is a much less complicated sell with the present pressure on technology budgets.
"Resource decisions are challenging. We all know there's going to be less dollars out there, and we've got to commit what we've got ideal," Bowman said. "In the previous, we were awash in money. Folks could go out and do what they thought was ideal without looking subsequent door to see if somebody had currently completed what they have been gonna do, so we wound up with concentric fiber circles in locations like Balad, Bagram, and you can retain on going. Right here in the U.S., Joint Bases are joint in name only. Why do we have to have two communications closets that expense hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece that are only sometimes connected to each other? Why do we have to have 3 commands on the same base all running their own technique? We don't. We don't will need to personal it and we never require to handle it. We have to have to divest that and place that requirement with a person who has it as a core competency, much as enterprise e mail is with DISA. They're fantastic at it. Let's give it to them and watch them do it, make positive it's as excellent as what we've got today. And it had greater be superior."