The Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Office looks to deliver computing resources around the world

As choices are examined and strategies perfected about cloud migration in the greater National Capital Region, one of the many federal-government spaces where important decisions are being executed is within the office of the Army CIO.

The person who is the “principal adviser,” assisting the Army CIO in “the development of strategy, use, and optimization of Cloud resources” is Paul Puckett, appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 2019 and assuming the role of the director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Office.

“I’m able to influence policy and governance, but then I’m also able to strategize and then implement capabilities and deliver them for the United States Army,” Puckett said on Federal Monthly Insights – Cloud Migration Strategy and Cloud FinOps.

When Puckett arrived at the office of the Army CIO, he was greeted by a multi-cloud Army. He found that it was not as “coherent” as it could be to serve the “greater needs of the Army.”

“So what we did is we delivered a capability that we call cArmy, which is really the foundational security services, if you will, that allow us to adopt commercial cloud services, meeting all DoD policy and governance in security,” Puckett said on Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

“But more importantly what it means is we’ve already prepared an environment and ecosystem so system owners, as they come to the front door, aren’t worried about what their security posture might look like,” Puckett said. “We’ve already addressed that foundation, what we’re now trying to account for is how is your application or system designed? Who is your customer? And what data sets are you either consuming or creating? And how can we start to expose your services and data to the rest of the Army and start to deliver greater this greater enterprise ecosystem?”

In 2022, Puckett’s vision is to extend cArmy from both an infrastructure computer-storage, networking perspective, as well as a common services perspective, into the OCONUS (Outside the Continental United States) regions.

“So we’re adopting a very similar regionally distributed model that any hyperscaler would, because we want to be mindful of physics, we want to be mindful of our customers and our data sets,” Puckett said. “You have to be mindful of latency. So it’s not just the availability of the connectivity, but also the speed of light is still a bound thing. And so we want to make sure that we’re being thoughtful of the customer experience, as we deliver capabilities globally.”

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