Defense Logistics Agency Upgrades LMS to the Cloud for Agility and Reliability

As the U.S. Department of Defense migrates more mission-critical workloads to the cloud, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) recently upgraded its training-delivery application, moving it from its on-premises data center into a commercial cloud environment. With this upgrade, DLA employees have improved capability, and the agency is blazing a trail within the DoD for the use of commercial cloud to empower the workforce.

The upgrade of the Learning Management System (LMS) software suite, used to manage and deliver online education courses and training, was the first case of a DoD agency obtaining approval to host a large-scale learning management application with sensitive data in the commercial cloud. DLA received Defense Department approval for SAP National Security Services’ (NS2) cloud-based LMS solution. Within that approval framework, SAP NS2 chose Amazon Web Services as the commercial host. This shows other providers who serve government customers in need of hosting for their enterprise-scale workloads that the DoD-accredited AWS GovCloud (US) infrastructure is a viable solution.

In addition to the improved security and compliance posture DLA has established with this migration, agency end users are experiencing more agility, reliability, efficiency, and speed of content delivery for their valuable educational endeavors. DLA employees can now more easily see what training they need and when it’s due. “My Info” is displayed more prominently, among other things, so it’s simpler to update when someone relocates or gets a new supervisor.

Teresa Cesario, DLA Information Operations project manager said, “We’ve already been talking to other agencies, exchanged lessons learned and talked about what we’ve been going through. There’s definitely an interest.” Teresa worked with Michelle Jacobs, Director, Defense Information Systems Agency Liaison & Hosting Office, to put together a team to sponsor SAP NS2 and AWS in order to meet the DoD requirements.

To help ensure our customers are able to maximize the advantages of the cloud, AWS has worked with partner organizations since its inception. Partners, like SAP NS2, are finding new ways to help both civilian and defense agencies at every stage of the cloud adoption journey, from migrating workloads to building entirely new applications.