An e-mail account that moves with you

To provide soldiers with a single e-mail account and a new single sign on for some applications, the Army plans to move its e-mail service to a cloud computing environment.

The change as well aims to give soldiers better access to their contacts and files, according to a top Army information innovation official.

The service is migrating 1

The service is migrating 1.6 million e-mail and calendar accounts on Army Microsoft Exchange from its local servers, scattered around the world, to a unified cloud computing environment managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The move includes Transportation Command, European Command and Africa Command.

Soldiers would have a single e-mail account and network identity at their posts and during deployed. In turn, the Army aims to create a single “global address list” or worldwide directory of personnel.

Microsoft SharePoint, a widely used suite of collaborative business tools often limited by these security boundaries, will be easier to use between installations, agencies and services once it is added to the DISA cloud, as the Army intends, Krieger said.“All of a sudden, everyone’s available to get access to data,” Krieger said, “I want the security boundary to be around the Army,” as opposed to within the service.

The Army is exploring the use of software that

The Army is exploring the use of software that would remotely check non-DoD-issued computers as they access secure Army networks to determine whether those computers are secure, Krieger said.