MilCloud 2.0 Meets Another Milestone

After coming online months earlier than expected in February, CSRA’s private cloud—called milCloud 2.0—is advancing in capabilities it can provide Defense Department customers.

On Tuesday, the company announced a provision authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency to operate Impact Level 5 systems, which are the most sensitive unclassified national security systems the Defense Department operates, including mission-critical data and controlled unclassified information.

“DISA has been an excellent partner throughout this process,” said CSRA President Larry Prior, in a statement. “Through milCloud 2.0, CSRA is providing our warfighters with an ‘easy button’ for cloud acceleration, allowing new flexibility to focus on their mission while saving time, money and resources.”

In a statement, DISA said the provisional authorization is a one-year conditional authorization that will give early customers the ability to connect and run in the on-premises, private cloud environment. CSRA won the $500 million milCloud 2.0 award last year, making it one of the key vehicles through which Defense Department customers can purchase cloud services.

“For the next 60 days, we will be working with our early adopters to fine-tune our business processes,” said Caroline Bean, DISA milCloud 2.0 program manager, in a statement. “The next step will be to open the doors for business to everyone else who is waiting to onboard. Our target is early May.”

CSRA intends to attain authorization to host secret classified data by 2019, according to company officials. Currently, only a handful of cloud service providers have achieved Impact Level 5 authorizations, including IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.