DoD makes leadership change on cloud effort

The Department of Defense’s new chief information officer will head the organization’s much anticipated transition to the cloud and oversee an upcoming contract that’s thought to be worth $10 billion.

Dana Deasy, who assumed the Pentagon’s top IT job in April, will lead DoD’s cloud initiative, effective June 22, according to Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan, .

DoD’s primary cloud contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, seeks to modernize IT across the department.

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The contract is thought to be valued at $10 billion and to be awarded to a single vendor. The Pentagon has not yet released a formal solicitation.

Previously, Chief Management Officer, John Gibson, was leading this effort.

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After about a week on the job, Deasy shared his thoughts on cloud computing with a large industry audience at a conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

He explained the importance of establishing what the cloud can do for an organization early on as it can do different things for different organizations, with each service having its own permutation and challenges.

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Deasy added that cloud computing allows IT professionals and organizations the opportunity to do things they could not before such as self healing, awareness and access to more services on the fly.

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