The US National Security Agency's (NSA) hybrid cloud platform is now operational.
As first reported by Federal News Network, the Hybrid Compute Initiative went live earlier this year.
The project is an evolution of the NSA's on-premise GovCloud environment, introducing commercial cloud offerings.
Chief finance manager at the NSA, Jennifer Kron, revealed that the initiative had launched during the 2024 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, on October 29.
Kron said: "This year it went live, and we are deploying mission with our partner. 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].”
The NSA partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the project, awarding the cloud provider a potential $10 billion contract as part of the initiative in 2022. The project was codenamed "WildandStormy."
Kron added that the Initiative is "all about finding the right compute solution for each mission, the right option for every distinct problem and for every distinct purpose," and works alongside the Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract which offers services of five cloud vendors.
“That might be commercial cloud, it could be C2E, it could be an NSA instance of a [top secret] cloud. It could be hardware-as-a-service for things that don’t quite work on commercial cloud. It could be on-prem. There’s a whole range of options. And so we’ve kind of evolved from saying, ‘No, we can’t do cloud that’s too open’ to ‘everything on the cloud,’ to really having a discernment as to what missions and what purposes should go into what which platform.”
According to Kron, this move was made to improve reliability, performance, scalability, modularity, and efficiency.
The Hybrid Compute Initiative was launched in 2021, however, reports about the initiative first emerged in 2020. It aims to maximize commercial cloud capabilities while maintaining some data and operations on internal services.
While awarded to AWS in 2021, Microsoft filed an appeal against the decision claiming that the NSA did not properly evaluate its proposal. In April 2022, the NSA re-awarded it to AWS, stating at the time that it had "reevaluated the proposals and made a new best value decision.”
The NSA operates a data center in Utah, which was launched in 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion and is known as the Bumblehive. It has other data centers across the US - including the Georgia Cryptologic Operations Center, the Texas Cryptology Center, the Hawaii Regional Operation Data Center, and Fort Meade supercomputing center, as well as others around the world, including in the UK and Denmark.
