Dana Deasy, chief information officer of the Department of Defense and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, told C4ISRNET in an interview published Thursday about DoD’s progress with the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program and plans to have the first “unclassified” environment in place by mid-February as part of that effort.
“It’s going to have a whole bunch of variety of services,” Deasy said of the unclassified JEDI environment. “We will add on more and more services as time goes on.”
Deasy shared his office’s plans to set up the secret and top secret environments as part of the JEDI program, which he said will be composed of cross-domain platforms that will help facilitate the movement of data and “ensure it sits in its right classification.”
He said the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center reflects DoD’s efforts to collaborate with small startups, larger technology firms and academic institutions. He discussed the National Defense Strategy and how it led him to think about the potential role of cloud in accelerating the pace of procurement and how AI could impact warfare.
Deasy also talked about DoD’s efforts to engage small businesses and startups, strengthen security in the supply chain and adopt an Agile approach to technology as well as the potential of 5G technology to support the Pentagon’s communications infrastructure.