GDIT’s Jim Matney: Workloads Migrated to DISA’s milCloud 2.0 Doubled in 2020

Jim Matney, vice president and general manager for DISA and enterprise services at General Dynamics’ information technology business, said the Defense Information Systems Agency saw a twofold increase in the number of workloads migrated to the milCloud 2.0 platform last year, Nextgov reported Monday.

Matney said several updates to the platform could encourage more defense agencies to move their workloads to milCloud 2.0, which is backed by GDIT’s cloud infrastructure, and one of those is the shift to VMware. GDIT completed an update to its hypervisor in January with its transition to VMware’s virtualization software, which Matney said is being used by many government clients in their data centers. 

“When we're looking at being able to migrate applications into the cloud, that's huge,” Matney told Nextgov in an interview. “That's a significant benefit that will make it where it's easy for them—they're not having to learn a new environment just to get their application into the cloud.”

On Feb. 1, GDIT announced the availability of Amazon Web Services capabilities through the milCloud 2.0 contract to provide Department of Defense mission partners access to cloud services and enable them to advance innovation.

“We offer the infrastructure-as-a-service,” Matney said. “We don't have the [software-as-a-service] offerings or any of the platform-as-a-service offerings available within our cloud offerings to date, but AWS does. So the additional capabilities that AWS has and their cloud offerings, their services, is what we wanted to be able to provide the warfighters.”

Another factor that would accelerate workload migration to the cloud platform is the transition to a higher impact level. Matney said testing for Impact Level 6, which includes classified workloads, is scheduled to kick off by mid-March and run through the summer of this year.