The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is currently in the process of developing a novel cloud service management platform for public cloud users focused on lowering the barriers to entry for getting started in public cloud networks.

Called Olympus, the platform, “Focuses on providing what I call the common services,” Korie Seville, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Compute and Senior Technical Adviser for J9 Hosting and Compute at DISA says.

Olympus will prioritize enterprise network connectivity and boundary protection, along with common services.

“These are things like name resolution, certificates, network time. All these things that are often overlooked in deployment, but they’re crucial to getting an application off the ground. They’re there for you,” Seville adds.

The pilot version of Olympus is hosted by DISA in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Seville emphasizes that the Hosting and Compute Center (HAC) adopts an iterative approach, incorporating customer feedback into product development, including Olympus.

Earlier this year, Seville also revealed that the agency’s current pilot initiatives aimed at offering cloud services to military branches outside the US are progressing satisfactorily.

“Our goal is to not only test the waters of what operational edge cloud would look like, but also to test the waters of how do you maintain and manage a global infrastructure that is delivered in the way the cloud is, which is central control, central capability, and basically a level of agnosticism where, if you’re providing a service, you may not know where it is as a user, but you’re just using it and it’s available everywhere you go,” Seville said at a GovCIO event.

DISA announced its new Outside the Continental US (OCONUS) cloud capability in August last year.