Dell EMC: $1B Air Force Cloud Project Is Just the Beginning

Today public cloud, tomorrow hybrid cloud? Dell EMC provides some detail on the Air Force's big cloud move.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

September 21, 2017

2 Min Read
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The United States Air Force's $1 billion contract to move 776,000 users to the cloud for collaboration is just the beginning of how the service arm can take advantage of the cloud, according to a Dell EMC executive.

The Air Force awarded a $1 billion contract to Dell EMC , General Dynamics Corp. and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) for a five-year transition to Office 365, Dell EMC announced Thursday. The program, called Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES), follows the $296 million Collaboration Pathfinder contract awarded by the Air Force to the same companies two years ago, migrating more than 140,000 users. (See US Air Force Awards $1B Cloud Contract.)

During Collaboration Pathfinder, 3,000 to 5,000 users per week migrated to the cloud without service interruption, Cameron Chehreh, Dell EMC Federal chief technology officer, tells Enterprise Cloud News.

Figure 1: United States Air Force 355th Security Force Squadron guardsman, Senior Airman Mario Fajardo, stands guard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. United States Air Force 355th Security Force Squadron guardsman, Senior Airman Mario Fajardo, stands guard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

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Collaboration Pathfinder and CHES could be just the beginning for the Air Force, which can build private clouds on-premises, and use the open APIs of Office 365 to connect to the public cloud for a hybrid cloud services, Chehreh says.

Dell is prime vendor on the contract and is supplying servers, storage and networking to Microsoft's government cloud, which is providing Office 365 services. General Dynamics is the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world.

Dell will provide consulting on user migration, as well as training, assisting on end-user setup, moving certificates for security profiles, and other "workforce transformation" services, Chehreh says.

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About the Author

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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