UPDATED 16:30 EDT / NOVEMBER 30 2022

CLOUD

US Army’s ECMA emphasizes a ‘quality-first’ approach as it standardizes hybrid cloud adoption

Just as cloud and digital transformation serve private sector interests, they also enable public sector capabilities.

One example is the United States Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, or ECMA, which has entered into a joint project with Accenture Federal Services to create a blueprint for agency-wide hybrid cloud adoption.

“When you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency,” said Paul Puckett (pictured, right), director, enterprise cloud management agency for the U.S. Army. “We wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality, and not so much be afraid of the scale of the Army and the size.”

Puckett and Justin Shirk (pictured, left), managing director and cloud go-to market lead at Accenture Federal Services, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Walls at the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the considerations involved in executing the U.S. Army-Accenture project thus far. (* Disclosure below.)

Looking beyond scale

The Army is a large organization, with more than 1 million personnel currently. But, while scale is a big consideration when laying out digital strategy, quality should come first, according to Puckett. This has been ECMA’s position throughout its three years of existence.

Shortly after the ECMA’s creation, the organization adopted a new strategy tagged “buy, secure and build.” Its purpose was to create a system through which the Agency could acquire and manage cloud services at scale.

“You could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really forward-thinking and forward-leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it’s really kind of a sleepy area, cloud account acquisition,” Shirk said.

ECMA wasn’t immune to the usual pushback that comes with scaling cloud adoption either, according to Puckett.

“There’s a lot of fear and trepidation around something you don’t understand,” he said. “And so part of it is the teaching, training, the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to the sensitivity of Department of Defense’s information.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent. Neither Accenture PLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU