Army’s cloud office gets upgraded to an agency
Goodbye Enterprise Cloud Management Office; hello Enterprise Cloud Management Agency.
The team tasked with laying the foundation for the Army’s enterprise technology modernization has a new name and upgraded status, the Army’s Office of the CIO announced Monday.
The boost in status to a field operating agency of the CIO instead of just an office comes a year after the erstwhile ECMO became functionally operational. The agency will retain its director, Paul Puckett, and continue to report to Army CIO Raj Iyer. The change gives “new responsibilities and authorities to orchestrate and synchronize enterprise-wide cloud activities,” Iyer said in a statement to FedScoop.
“The formation of the ECMA as a new field operating agency represents the Army’s commitment to centralized acceleration to the cloud and adopting new digital technologies to implement the Army’s Digital Modernization Strategy,” Iyer said.
ECMO was originally stood up in November 2019, reaching its “functional” operating capability in March of 2020 — a status designating less than fully operational as it was short on staff due to the pandemic. The office was set up to lay the foundation for much of the modernization the Army hopes to achieve in migrating to the cloud. On top of this core mission, last March the then-ECMO helped support the rapid shift to teleworking on a new cloud-based Commercial Virtual Remote Environment.
Since that initial pivot to telework support, the agency has worked on building out core enterprise technology modernization capabilities. One example of its work is cARMY, the Army’s enterprise cloud environment that leaders have said is important in supporting broader programs like Project Convergence, which aims to fuse battlefield data in multi-domain operations.
