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

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.

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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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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News