Switch to cloud-based email runs into hurdles - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Switch to cloud-based email runs into hurdles

The Army has slowed its transition to cloud-based enterprise email as it resolves a series of glitches that have frustrated users, the information technology community and Army leaders.

Mike Krieger, the Army’s deputy chief information officer, said there’s now a “pause” in efforts to move 1.6 million email users to centralized Defense Department servers from email services based on local servers.

“I think we’re behind schedule but for all the right reasons,” Krieger said in an interview with Army Times. “We really need to refine the business process so that when we turn the migrations back on, it will go faster and quicker, and we will resolve these problems that we know about.”

The Army began to slow the transitions to “mail.mil” in June, with plans to resume its previous pace of 1,000 users per night in August.

“This will probably go on for another three or four weeks,” Krieger said. “It will definitely make the Army stronger and I think the rest of the migrations will move out quicker. There is definitely a user dissatisfaction with customer experiences with email.”

Based on Microsoft Exchange 2010 Enterprise E-mail, the system is meant to provide users with a host of improvements, including larger mailboxes, collaborative tools, calendaring and access to a 3.9 million-user DoD contact list. Users would also be able to access their email from any DoD computer, using their Common Access Card.

“When I was in Korea, I was able to use my CAC card to log into another government computer via a DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] program called ‘DoD User,’” Krieger said. “I could never have done that in the past, logged into my email on that machine … I did the same thing in Hawaii and the same thing at Fort Lewis [Wash.].”

Since it began in January, the Army has migrated more than 85,000 users at the Pentagon, Fort Huachuca, Ariz., and Fort Belvoir, Va., among others, to servers managed by DISA. The original plan was to complete the migrations to “mail.mil” at the end of 2012, but the effort is at least three months behind schedule.

Connectivity issues, service interruptions and schedule delays have plagued the process.

“Leadership’s definitely aware,” Krieger said. “I think we’re all a little frustrated with the problems with the Army network that enterprise email has revealed.”

Because the transitioning units have all been in the U.S., operational and tactical forces have only been affected in garrison, if at all, Army officials said. The Army has not begun to migrate classified networks, either.

Information systems technicians, some who feel that control of their systems is being taken away from them, have voiced frustration on an internal electronic mailing list.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Mike Danberry, who oversees a brigade IT section and who maintains the site militarycac.com, said one technician on the list likened the enterprise email to a Star Trek villain, The Borg. “He said we’ll all be assimilated to mail.mil,” Danberry said. “‘Resistance is futile.’”

Krieger, who has often responded directly to their pointed questions, pointed to inconsistent firewall configurations and problems creating users’ identities, among other sources of the technical hiccups.

He also described the friction as a shift in roles. “DISA’s learning how to be a service provider and the Army’s learning how to be a service consumer,” he said.

Meanwhile, Krieger said that Army has no plans to shutter Army Knowledge Online, its multipurpose online portal, and current provider of email services, though AKO may lose some funding and be reorganized.

“AKO’s not going away,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is go to one managed enterprise service for email and take down email everywhere else it’s been redundant.”

He said it will likely continue as a portal to other services, such as pay and benefits information, and he suggested AKO may survive as a source of email for retirees and the family members of soldiers.

According to a report in Federal Computer Week last month, the CIO/G-6 office recommended in an internal memo that AKO’s funding be decreased from $70 million in fiscal 2012 to no more than $20 million in fiscal 2017.

The memo surfaced after Congress took steps to attach strings to the funding of enterprise email. In May, a House Armed Services subcommittee held all but 2 percent of the program’s funding until the Army produced a cost-benefit analysis of the new email. Asked if the intent was to shift money from AKO into enterprise email, Krieger said, “That’s not an accurate characterization,” adding the CIO has launched a new effort to determine the cost of AKO’s email services.

He said the Army has since provided Congress with the business-case analysis and is in the process of answering follow-on questions.

Retired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, a former Army chief information officer who spearheaded the move to enterprise email, said it made better sense than retaining AKO, which does not afford a corporate “power user” the best collaborative tools.

The Army executed a three-year licensing deal with Microsoft two years ago, he said, and enterprise email allows the Army to make full use of the software.

Faced with a decision to buy new servers across the Army or latch onto DISA’s more advanced servers and consolidate its own, the Army chose the latter, Sorenson said. What’s more, it saves the Army $800,000 over four years.

“When the information gets laid out to the people on [Capitol] Hill, they’ll understand that what the Army decided to do made sense,” he said.