Army cloud office to be set up by March, CIO says

The Army’s new Enterprise Cloud Management Office will be in “full swing” by March, Army CIO Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford said Tuesday.

The ECMO aims to help the Army achieve “convergence,” a strategic objective to combine information and capabilities across warfighting domains by having central data and cloud enterprise capabilities.  Paul Puckett, a former technology officer at Pivotal Software with technology experience in government, will lead the office to be the Army’s cloud and data hub.

To achieve the “monumental task” of data migration, the Army plans to spend $730 million of reallocated funds for its cloud efforts through fiscal 2023, Crawford said at AFCEA’s Army IT Day.

“We needed to centralize all things cloud,” Crawford said. “The ECMO is designed to better Army commands through a centralized office, and improve the ability to facilitate cloud projects and oversee migration to the cloud network.”

The office will remove some Army direct reporting units and other parts of military bureaucracy that “lack of organic capacity to get started” on building cloud networks, Crawford said in November.

Crawford hinted that the ECMO will initially have a small staff — its mission will be “less about numbers and more about capabilities.”

Creating the office was a part of a new and vigorous push by the Army to up its cloud game. Obtaining artificial intelligence capabilities through enterprise cloud computing is a priority for Secretary Ryan McCarthy.

Later during the event, Jennifer Potts, deputy project manager for the Army Enterprise Systems Integration Program, said “millions” of Army data points are being migrated to the cloud each day. 

“It is really an exciting time to be in this space,” she said.