Air Force Saves Costs and Increases Reliability by Moving Portal to the Cloud

The U.S. Air Force migrated the Air Force Portal, which posts officer promotional lists and other information, to the cloud. With a pay-as-you-go model, the Air Force only has to pay if the portal is being used, instead of a flat fee upfront. This model leads to savings when traffic is down.

Migrating applications to a commercial cloud eliminates the need for the government to manage and sustain enough servers in times of maximum traffic such as staff sergeant promotion release days.

“Now our services are running at a cost of about $140,000 a month. If you compare this to our heritage environment, where the software alone costs us $1.3 million, and don’t include the labor to support that system, that is a huge savings upfront,” said Kerry Coburn, program manager for common computing environment acquisitions at Hanscom.

Moving the portal into the cloud is part of an ongoing effort by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center to bring hundreds of separate Air Force applications to the cloud. The portal’s nearly three quarters of a million average users per month will not see a break in service, but may notice increased reliability as the Air Force moves its software onto more modern hosting systems.

 “We currently have 39 applications in our pipeline that are being refactored to go live in the cloud. We have eight applications right now, the portal being one of them,” Coburn said. “Beyond that 39, we have another 84 that we are putting on contract … I expect that slowly our airmen are going to see a huge increase in the responsiveness of the apps that they use daily to do their jobs.”

Adoption of cloud computing is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage. Our nation’s warfighters deserve the most innovative and secure solutions.

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