Braxton Taylor
The Army is moving its personnel and pay system to the cloud, an effort that has begun in earnest with the hiring of Oracle to host the HR records of more than 1 million soldiers.
Announced last month, the effort will move the guts of the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army, which the service uses to manage recruitment, personnel, and soldiers’ medical files, to a custom-cloud environment. Plans are being drawn up by the IPPS-A product management team at Army Program Executive Office Enterprise. The new system must be operational by December 2027, a PEO spokesperson said.
The work will be carried out under the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, a two-year-old, up-to-$9 billion contract vehicle that has already seen task orders worth more than $1 billion.
The value of Oracle’s new deal hasn’t been released, but it is the “biggest competitively awarded JWCC contract” so far, according to Kim Lynch, executive vice president for Oracle’s government defense and intelligence business. “So that has been a huge win for us.”
Before that migration can start, Oracle must build a secure environment to host services, applications, and data.
“The awarded task order allows the team to conduct parallel operations in building an Oracle Broker Landing Zone environment at the Army level and the operating environments for the IPPS-A tenancy,” the Army spokesperson said. “This step is critical to lay the necessary framework for migration of the IPPS-A system and its associated environments.”
The Army is also working with the Defense Information Systems Agency to create a private cloud that can be used to test the nascent personnel-and-pay system.
“This will enable us to begin the initial steps in a phased approach of migrating IPPS-A into a cloud environment based on our draft plan. This careful planning and execution is designed to minimize application disruption during the testing phase of the migration plan, prior to going live,” the Army said.
The task order award makes Oracle the “third cloud-service provider to the Army’s cloud construct plan,” an Army PEO Enterprise spokesperson told Defense One via email. And once the landing zone is completed, it will be easier for the Army to migrate other organizations to the cloud, if needed, and give organizations more to choose from when it comes to service providers.
The IPPS-A contract award also feeds into the Army’s plans to simplify its data infrastructure by creating data exchanges that support multiple networks and systems.
“One specific effort IPPS-A is leveraging through the migration is automation and the ability to present a comprehensive Unified Data Reference Architecture (UDRA) in support of the Army ASA (ALT) and CIO initiatives.”
The Army has been upgrading IPPS-A to be more user-friendly, including making the system accessible on mobile devices. Moving the system to the cloud could also improve users’ experience.
“Using the enterprise cloud solution will allow IPPS-A to leverage available cloud-native-computing software to assist in the development and overall delivery of the IPPS-A application to the field. Once established and migrated, the impact to the overall user experience may not be immediately apparent,” the Army spokesperson said. “However, the back-end areas of the system, such as development, testing and production will receive necessary performance improvements because of the migration to the cloud, which provides operating efficiencies and cost saving to the program and the government in the future years. Ultimately, the impact on the user will be the speed at which the program will be able to deliver new capability.”
The cloud-based system will start with unclassified data, including controlled unclassified information.
Lynch said the award shows that Oracle is finally gaining recognition as a legitimate cloud-service provider in the Pentagon. In 2018, Oracle unsuccessfully sued the Pentagon after being left out of the $10 billion competition for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud contract that preceded JWCC.
“It’s always a blessing and a curse to be newer to the market. The blessing is you’ve built the latest technology,” she said. “The curse is that it takes a long time for awareness in the market. So we’re working really hard at that.”
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