Venice Goodwine, chief information officer at the Department of the Air Force, is looking to expand the use of cloud services across the Air Force to include classified networks and applications in the tactical edge to address warfighters’ data needs, Federal News Network reported Thursday.
Speaking at a recent Air Force-related event, Goodwine said her cloudy strategy focuses on expanding the cloud from the Department of Defense’s Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network and extending cloud capabilities at the tactical edge.
“That’s my reliance on commercial cloud services at the edge because if I’m going to have decision advantage, I have to make sure that the data is available. The data needs to be where the warfighter is and the data needs to be in the cloud,” the 2024 Wash100 awardee said.
“I don’t intend to put the data in the continental United States when I’m fighting in [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command]. I need the data there. But then I also need the cloud at the edge. I need the data at the edge. I need artificial intelligence to make sense of the data. And it needs to be trusted. So all the attributes, you talk about data, I need all of that there. So it’s not just enterprise IT. It is it for the warfighter. That’s my mantra and you’ll hear me say that all the time and my team speak that same language,” she explained.
Goodwine said Air Force workloads and applications will remain in the service branch’s Cloud One multi-cloud, multi-vendor ecosystem.
The Air Force anticipates releasing three solicitations for CloudOne Next in the third quarter of 2024 and awarding blanket purchase agreements in the fourth quarter.
Attend the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Air Force Summit on July 23 to hear more about the military service’s modernization efforts and adoption of cutting-edge technology. Register here!
