IBM has signed a five year contract with the US Army to provide infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and to build, manage and operate cloud solutions that offer greater flexibility and performance.
The solution will be part of the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) programme, with a one year task order to be followed by four additional one year options under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract.
The total cost of the contract is expected to be $62m for the five year period. In addition to building the infrastructure, IBM will enable the army in establishing computing power on an as-needed basis and efficient and effective IT.
The army is planning to migrate applications to private cloud. In the first year, the army expects to move at least 35 applications to the cloud in the first year.
The project needs Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Impact Level 5 (IL-5) Provisional Authorisation. Information impact levels consider the potential impact of information being compromised.
With IL-5, IBM, as the cloud provider has been given the authority to manage controlled, unclassified information.
As per IBM, the army expects to achieve DISA IL-6, its highest level, within one year. With IL-6, IBM would move from working on classified information to working on secrete information.
U.S. Army CIO Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell said: “With this project, we’re beginning to bring the IT infrastructure of the US Army into the 21st century.
“Cloud computing is a game-changing architecture that provides improved performance with high efficiency, all in a secure environment.”
IBM US Federal general manager said Sam Gordy, “Clients today are increasingly looking at the cloud as a pathway to innovation.
“This IBM Cloud solution will provide the Army with greater flexibility and will go a long way toward mitigating, and, in some cases eliminating, the security challenges inherent with multiple ingress and egress points.”
