Army completes first stage of cloud email move

The Army has completed the first phase of its migration to a cloud enterprise email service provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency, with 14,000 accounts transferred since February.

Margaret McBride, a spokeswoman for the Army Chief Information Officer, said the first accounts moved include those for the CIO organization and Army communications units, including the Network Enterprise Technology Command-9th Signal Command, Fort Huachuca, Ariz; 7th Signal Command, Fort Gordon, Ga.; and the 93rd Signal Brigade; Fort Riley, Kan.

The Army plans to begin to transfer the 10,000 email accounts for Army headquarters staff this June and complete the migration of 1.4 million unclassified network accounts and 200,000 secret network accounts by the end of the year. The Army expects to save more than $100 million a year though the efficiencies gained from the enterprise email system, starting in 2013, McBride said.

Army deputy CIO Mike Krieger said in an April 6 blog post that the email transition has hit a few bumps. The hard part he said, is migrating the data from the old mailbox to the new mailbox in the DISA cloud. "This is like sucking a 50-gallon drum of soda through a straw, sometimes over long distances," Krieger said.

Initially users were asked to pare down the data in their mailboxes to 100 megabytes, Krieger said, but even less is better: "We have learned that 50 Mb works much better, and we are now able to execute most migrations in a minute or less which was our goal."

The Army stands in the vanguard of a governmentwide project to migrate email to the cloud, a project detailed by federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra this Wednesday.

Kundra said 15 federal agencies have identified 100 government email systems comprising nearly 1 million individual email users who will be moved from government-owned data storage space to the cloud, under a $2.5 billion procurement managed by the General Services Administration.