The National Security Agency is moving out on its information technology modernization goals and adopting cloud services across multiple fronts, with the agency’s Hybrid Compute Initiative in full swing.

Jennifer Kron, NSA’s deputy chief information officer, said the initiative has two chief elements.

“There is a commercial cloud, and then there’s some hardware as a service,” Kron said during Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2023. “The commercial cloud part is a classified NSA top-secret instance of a commercial cloud ecosystem for our core products. But we also have as part of HCI hardware as a service where for certain things that we can’t move yet at least to a commercial cloud, we’re renting the bare bones hardware that we can build upon.”

Moving HCM to the cloud

NSA also recently awarded Oracle a contract for a cloud-based human capital management system. The system is “an example where we’re choosing a purpose-built cloud solution, where we determined that the industry solution really was the best one,” she said.

“Our human capital management systems don’t tend to be where we make the greatest investment and making sure that things are user-friendly, up-to-date and easy to operate,” Kron continued. “This is one of those things that’s going to really improve experience across the entire enterprise in a way that everybody can see and appreciate. And it’s part of where we’re looking across the board at all of our business and management systems, not only mission systems, but also the things that keep the agency running and making sure that those are kept up to date and are of course secure.”

Meanwhile, in 2020, the Central Intelligence Agency awarded the Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract to five major cloud providers. The C2E contract is available to the entire intelligence community for ordering classified cloud services.

Piloting Azure for C2E

NSA is the sponsor for Microsoft’s Azure Cloud under the C2E contract. Microsoft received an authority to operate for Azure under C2E last year. The services will include infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and Microsoft 365 to replace Office 2019 products.

As agencies adopt multiple cloud solutions, NSA is balancing the need for different IT solutions with the need for integration across those environments, Kron said.

“We’re really focusing on the right cloud or the right compute solution for each mission,” she said. “But there is that added degree of difficulty of having to integrate and interoperate across the various clouds.”

In some cases, “things have to run in two places before you can shut down the first and build up the second,” she said.

The Defense Department and the intelligence community also continue to be challenged to ensure government processes, like accreditation, keep pace with vendor innovation, Kron said.

“And then you always come down to the people and the culture — and just the knowledge and skill gaps — that we may have as developers and systems administrators and security,” she continued. “In some ways, cloud is the natural evolution of where we’ve been going for years. But there are some things that are different. And we need to make sure that our workforce and our people understand where things might be a little more challenging, or a slightly different way of approaching it.”

To read or watch other sessions on demand, go to our 2023 DoD Cloud Exchange event page.

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