The Army enterprise email system now has about 30,000 users online with a million expected by the end of the year and other departments in the military are lining up to go live, said Paige Atkins, Director for Strategic Planning and Information at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
“We’re looking to a world where military personnel will have larger email boxes and one email address to follow them around their whole careers,” said Atkins, speaking at Friday’s AFCEA Nova luncheon at the Sheraton Premiere in Vienna, Va.
The enterprise system will also create a global DoD directory for the first time.
Atkins said that DISA is collaborating with the other branches of DoD and looking at requirements to create a timeline for departments to go online, but could not give exact details on which services or co-coms would be coming online.
As for the future of DISA, Atkins said the department is focused on finding new processes for horizontal collaboration that will speed up the way the agency works and help them keep ahead of adversaries who are looking to install the same processes.
“It’s obvious that we can’t continue to do business the same as we have before either from an operation and a fiscal standpoint,” Atkins said. “The real power for what we do is going to come from the ability to connect, share and collaborate.”
She also added that the organization is taking advantage of industry’s advantages in the cloud and will be looking to take advantage of existing infrastructures and the contracts associated with them for the early stages, but in some cases there will be new industry opportunities.
“Not all of the decks in the cloud will be DISA datacenters,” Atkins said. “Some of what we do depends on the architecture to determine how exactly we move forward.”
