The US National Security Agency’s (NSA) hybrid cloud platform is now operational. The Hybrid Compute Initiative went live in 2024. The project represents an evolution of the NSA’s on-premise GovCloud environment, now integrating commercial cloud offerings.
The NSA’s chief finance manager, Jennifer Kron, announced that the initiative was officially launched on October 29 during the 2024 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. Kron highlighted that the initiative aims to deploy mission-critical services in partnership with commercial providers.
Nsa’s cloud integration with AWS
“This year, it went live, and we are deploying the mission with our partner. That’s our core mission services, our IC GovCloud, which provides hundreds of programs and systems used not only by NSA but across the Intelligence Community and the Defense Department,” she stated. The NSA has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for this project, awarding the cloud provider a potential $10 billion contract in 2021 under the codename “WildandStormy.” The initiative seeks to find the optimal computing solution for various missions, incorporating a range of options, including commercial cloud, NSA’s own cloud instances, and hardware-as-a-service for specific needs.
Kron explained, “We’ve evolved from saying, ‘No, we can’t do cloud that’s too open’ to ‘everything on the cloud,’ to having a discernment as to what missions and purposes should go into which platform.”
The Hybrid Compute Initiative, which began in 2021 following preliminary discussions in 2020, was designed to improve reliability, performance, scalability, modularity, and efficiency by leveraging commercial cloud capabilities while retaining some operations internally. Although AWS was initially awarded the contract, Microsoft contested the decision, leading the NSA to reevaluate the proposals and re-award the contract to AWS. In addition to its Utah data center, known as the Bumblehive, the NSA operates multiple facilities across the United States, including the Georgia Cryptologic Operations Center, the Texas Cryptology Center, the Hawaii Regional Operation Data Center, and the Fort Meade Supercomputing Center, among others globally.
