Jennifer Kron, chief financial manager at the National Security Agency, said NSA’s hybrid cloud environment, also known as the Hybrid Compute Initiative, is now operational and that its goal is “all about finding the right compute solution for each mission, the right option for every distinct problem and for every distinct purpose,” Federal News Network reported Friday.
“This year it went live, and we are deploying mission with our partner,” Kron said of the initiative during a conference on Oct. 29 in Omaha, Nebraska. “That’s our core mission services, our IC GovCloud, which provides hundreds of programs and systems that are used not only by NSA, but across the IC and [the Defense Department].”
In July 2021, Amazon Web Services won a $10 billion cloud computing contract from NSA as part of the agency’s Hybrid Compute Initiative. In 2022, NSA moved to reaward the contract to AWS after it reevaluated bid submissions.
According to FNN, the increasing volume of data has driven NSA to consider and adopt more cloud offerings from commercial sources.
“The long term reasons why we made this shift is the increased reliability, increased performance, ultimate scalability and modularity, the efficiency,” Kron said.
“So there was no way we could get where we needed to go in [signals intelligence] and cyber without those partnerships,” added the former deputy chief information officer at NSA.