What DOD Can Do Now to Prep for the JEDI Cloud

The JEDI program is a critical strategic investment for DOD – one that has strong leadership support.

Now that the contract is awarded, are DOD agencies ready to actually move forward with JEDI deployments?  Buried deep in DOD’s 1,000+ Q&A responses during the RFP process is the idea that migrations to the JEDI cloud will come through a separate contract.  Whether this is competed as a multi-award vehicle at the department level or agency by agency, it’s going to take some time to operationalize the migration piece of JEDI – certainly longer than it will take to stand up the JEDI cloud itself.

This contracting disconnect sets up a scenario where the JEDI cloud is ready, but DOD agencies aren’t ready to use it.  It takes an average of eighteen months for Federal agencies to migrate assets and compute into the cloud.  Even if they started today, most DOD agencies wouldn’t be ready to take advantage of the JEDI cloud when it appears.

Prudent DOD agencies should be doing everything in their power to prepare the groundwork for JEDI cloud migrations now, while they have both time and end-of-year money to burn.

First and foremost, DOD agencies can get their network infrastructure in order.  Managing DNS between on-prem and cloud resources isn’t easy, particularly if the DNS infrastructure is decentralized.  By centralizing and automating their underlying DNS infrastructure now, DOD agencies will save time and energy during the cloud migration process.

BlueCat offers DOD agencies relevant solutions to prepare the way for the JEDI cloud, all of which can be easily fit into an end-of-year budget request.