While information-technology modernization has been an urgent priority for many private sector companies, the pace of change can often be slower in the U.S. government. However, one branch of the military has picked up the pace dramatically.

The U.S. Navy and SAP National Security Services recently migrated a large enterprise resource planning system to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s GovCloud.

“It handles about $70 billion in financial transactions each year and has over 72,000 users across six Navy commands,” said Jennifer Chronis (pictured), general manager, Department of Defense, at AWS. “It’s everything from timekeeping to ordering missile and radar components for Navy weapon systems. The migration to AWS GovCloud marks the Navy’s largest cloud migration to date.”

Chronis spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit event. They discussed how the Navy will improve decision making using analytics and improving security through a centralized repository of sensitive information. (* Disclosure below.)

Timely decisions

The migration was spurred by a system that users characterized as “fragile,” according to Chronis. The Navy’s on-premises infrastructure needed a major upgrade, and ERP data analytics were too slow to make effective decisions.

“This puts the movement and documentation of $70 billion worth of parts and goods into one accessible space so the information can be shared, analyzed and protected more uniformly,” Chronis said. “Moving the system to the cloud has allowed the Navy to make more timely and informed decisions and conduct advanced analytics that they weren’t able to do as efficiently in the past.”

The move to the cloud also enabled the Navy to enhance security. This has become a more important consideration as the Department of Defense has endured a series of troublesome breaches over the past decade, including classified information around the F-35 fighter jet, the C-17 cargo plane and the MQ-9 Reaper drone.

“Most people know that our U.S. Defense Industrial Base, or DIB, has experienced and continues to experience an increasing number of cyberattacks,” Chronis said. “This has given them the ability to increase their data protection, because now there’s only one cloud-based repository of data to protect instead of multiple across a host of traditional computing hardware.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit Online event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Jennifer Chronis