The US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is nearing completion of its DoD Olympus cloud offering.

Simultaneously, DISA is reportedly considering "retooling" its Stratus private cloud solution to give mission partners better options to work together in the cloud.

DISA's Department of Defense Olympus effort is currently set to have a minimum viable product by the end of September, ready for pilot testing, reports the Federal News Network.

Olympus, announced in March 2024, will focus on 'common services' that surround cloud workloads, including network connectivity and boundary protection, as well as a basic suite of common services.

At the time of the announcement, DISA's Korie Seville said that the goal of Olympus is to help DISA’s customers meet cloud needs quickly by “really lowering the barrier for entry for getting started in [the] cloud." The pilot version of this is hosted in Microsoft Azure cloud.

While relatively new, the project is progressing rapidly. DISA's J9 acting director Jeff Marshall detailed the project at the Defense One event on August 6.

"The first level is going to basically allow DoD Olympus to get all of the core services that a cloud environment requires, whether it’s DNS, DNS caching, Network Time Protocol — all those kinds of core services that really set an environment ready to go so you can deploy onto it. The second level of that is going to be a managed service. So, DISA J9 Hosting and Compute will be able to manage that entire environment for you,” said Marshall.

He added: “As we get further out and as we get better at things like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, we’re going to be able to use DoD Olympus to actually move your things around for mission partners. We’re going to be able to move their OSS around to different segments, whether it’s from a public cloud to a private cloud or from one CSP to another in a multi-cloud environment, depending on what the mission is and what the impact is.”

Olympus will ultimately be deployed across four cloud service providers: Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Oracle. The agency is currently focusing on interconnectivity between commercial and private clouds.

DISA is also looking at "retooling" its Stratus private cloud offering.

Reported by Defense Scoop and also city DISA's Jeff Marshall, the retooling aims to give mission partners better options to work together in the cloud.

Defense Department components are typically encouraged to use the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) of which Olympus is part of, but DISA's Marshall notes that this is not always the right choice for workloads.

“Maybe they’re already in AWS or Microsoft or Oracle or Google, and they’re realizing that for performance reasons, for data ingress/egress reasons, and for security and compliance reasons, maybe not all of their workload actually fits there anymore. And so now what we’re doing is we’re taking a more holistic approach and we’re looking at cloud as a hybrid cloud environment,” Marshall said. “We’re finding that sometimes JWCC and the public clouds is the right space for their workload, but at other times, we find that it’s actually private cloud in our Stratus offering that’s the right workload.”

Stratus is a multi-tenant, self-service management capability for compute, storage, and network infrastructure.

According to Marshall, the retooling seeks to make Stratus a "better private cloud offering" by prototyping a refresh of the infrastructure that will give the same scalability, elasticity, and metering that can be accessed via the JWCC.

Among the reasons that someone may opt for Stratus over the JWCC, is if compute needs of workloads are particularly high.

Marshall notes: “It’s a huge database that requires a lot of activity, a lot of moving parts, and a lot of infrastructure to support. While JWCC offers those things within the contracts, sometimes mission partners realize that they get very expensive very quickly — beyond what they are willing to pay for. And in those cases, we can generally offer that at a bit better discount."

Marshall also said that it can add a greater level of security compared to external CSPs.