Halvorsen: Not Adopting a Hybrid Cloud Solution Would Be Dumb

Taking advantage of the hybrid cloud environment is the smart thing to do, said Terry Halvorsen, U.S. Defense Department chief information officer.

“We would be completely stupid if we didn’t take advantage of hybrid cloud environment,” Halvorsen said while addressing audience at the AFCEA TechNet Asia-Pacific conference in Honolulu.

He went on to say the department will have a cloud solution providing a set of basic enterprise services, such as email, chat, video and file share. “They will be modeled after commercial, and it will be probably in partnership with a commercial provider,” he said.

He added that it will be designed to meet the Defense Department’s needs. For example, command and control will be executed through the Department of Defense Information Network.

Some of the technology will be housed in secure commercial entities, he said. “Some of that will be in commercial facilities that look an awful lot like government facilities from the outside and from the security wrap-around,” Halvorsen stated. “I’m perfectly convinced that industry today is willing and will, if we give them the right capabilities, build secure environments that we can use.”

Halvorsen says industry can provide secure commercial environments for cloud.#AFCEATechNet

— George Seffers (@gseffers) November 17, 2016

He went on to speculate that at some point a commercial facility will house a cloud environment for all of the government agencies to use.