“Government customers have signaled a strong, strong demand for the latest AI tools, especially for what we call our [Microsoft 365] co-pilot,” Candice Ling, vice president of Microsoft Federal, told FedScoop before the announcement. 

“By announcing the roadmap, we’re giving the agencies a heads up on how they can be prepared to adopt the capabilities that they want so much,” she added. “At the same time for those who haven’t done so, migrating to the cloud is a key first step to building and also looking at data governance, so that we can fully take advantage of the AI capabilities.”

Some of the key AI services that Microsoft will roll out in the coming months include: Azure OpenAI generative AI services for government, including GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 models; Azure OpenAI service for classified workloads; Teams Premium with intelligent recap in Microsoft 365 Government; Microsoft 365 Copilot update for government; and Open Source LLMs in Azure Government.

In a blog post shared exclusively with FedScoop that will publish Tuesday, Microsoft noted the higher levels of security and compliance required by government agencies when handling sensitive data. “To enable these agencies to fully realize the potential of AI, over the coming months Microsoft will begin rolling out new AI capabilities and infrastructure solutions across both our Azure commercial and Azure Government environments,” the blog post stated.

The new Azure OpenAI Service in Azure Government will enable the latest generative AI capabilities, including GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 models, for customers requiring higher levels of compliance and isolation. The product will be available in the first quarter of 2024.

Microsoft this summer will preview Azure OpenAI Services in its “air-gapped classified clouds to select national security customers.” The generative AI platform will be brought to its isolated classified cloud environment, enabling national security leaders and operators to use critical AI capabilities to analyze highly sensitive data anytime and anywhere.

The tech giant’s Teams Premium service with intelligent recap of meetings is expected to roll out to government users during the spring of 2024. Intelligent recap uses AI to help users summarize meeting content and focus on key elements through AI-generated meeting notes and tasks.

“So every agency, their needs are going to be different. But the theme that we’re hearing across the board is how we can transform the way they can deliver services to citizens that could really drive critical outcomes,” Ling told FedScoop. 

Ling added that consumers don’t have to be advanced programmers or data scientists to use the systems. “It’s anyone being able to ask the question about your data and being able to process information quite quickly. So anyone can do that now. And that can transform how the agencies work, right?”

Microsoft 365 Copilot for government is also expected to roll out during the summer of 2024, giving access to a “transformational AI assistant in GCC, bringing generative AI to our comprehensive productivity suite for a host of government users,” according to the blog post.

The Seattle-based company will announce on Tuesday that it has enabled access to open source AI model Llama-2 via the Azure Machine Learning catalog in Azure Government. The company recognizes that “some mission requirements benefit from smaller generative AI models” in addition to its own OpenAI models.

Microsoft’s AI rollout builds upon the June launch of its Azure OpenAI Service for the government to allow federal agencies to use powerful language models to run within the company’s cloud service for U.S. government agencies, Azure Government.

Microsoft in July also received FedRAMP high authorization, giving federal agencies who manage some of the government’s most sensitive data access to powerful language models including ChatGPT.

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The update to the cloud-based system was announced by Army CIO Raj Iyer on LinkedIn Monday. The new policy will allow soldiers to sign documents, potentially giving them greater flexibility to work remotely with the suite known as Army365.

The department decided to accept the related risk by using monitoring tools to audit the downloading of documents, Iyer said.

“When we initially rolled out Army365 we were not ready to address the Cybersecurity risks associated with allowing users to download/ upload files from your personal devices,” Iyer wrote on LinkedIn. “We now have a solution that we are currently implementing to enable you to do just that.”

The new all cloud-based Office 365 software replaces the Army’s current on-premises email system run by the Defense Information Systems Agency, known as Defense Enterprise Email, which is slated to shutter in March.

In a follow up exchange with FedScoop, Iyer clarified that the change is departmentwide. The Department of Defense CIO has adjusted the system’s cloud tenant configuration, and the Army implemented the new access through its instance of the work suite.

The change was sparked by complains from soldiers that they could not download documents to sign and then re-upload.

“[W]e heard your feedback loud and clear. The inability to download and digitally sign PDF files and forms from Army365 Email using your personal devices has been a pain for many of you – especially for the Guard and Reserve,” Iyer wrote in the LinkedIn post.

The rollout for the Army’s email system has been paired with a pilot allowing guardsmen and reservists to be able to use A365 on their personal devices. The goal has been to allow soldiers that only report to armories for drill time to be able to stay connected to their email while not connected to an Army network.

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The Office 365-based system gives sailors, Marines, civilians and contractors access to Microsoft Teams, chat and remote-based work systems. The project, called Flank Speed, represents the Navy’s version of a broad new cloud-based DOD365 remote and in-person suite of tools that provides a similar experience to the Commercial Virtual Remote environment created for the pandemic, but it has enhanced security measures that can handle information at the military’s Impact Level-5.

“The Navy has successfully enabled accounts for all users originally intended to have access to the Flank Speed collaboration capabilities in [fiscal 2021]. Full migration of remaining users throughout the Navy will continue through the rest of [fiscal 2022],” a Navy spokesperson said.

Some related tasks are incomplete. Users that remain in an on-premise Navy email system must still be migrated to O365’s email system. A Navy spokesperson said the department plans to move the last 272,000 email accounts to the Microsoft Office email system by the end of the fiscal year.

As of now, 200,000 users have been fully migrated to both the collaboration platform and the cloud-based email system. The old system users are being moved off of is an on-premise email system run by the Navy.

The Navy had missed initial deadlines in its migration when 138,000 users had yet to be transferred — or “enabled” in the Navy’s terms — to the new collaboration tools by Oct. 1. Now that all users in the department have access to the Microsoft tools, the next step remains moving them to the cloud-based email system that will give them a new “us.navy.mil” address, according to the spokesperson.

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Army CIO Raj Iyer told FedScoop that the service is working on alternative solutions for junior enlisted members and others who will not get access to the full suite of services in the Army’s transition to a new Microsoft Office 365-based back-office enterprise cloud system. He also said the decision to buy only 1.2 million licenses for the roughly 1.4 million people who work in the department was intentional to save money and buy only what he said will be used.

“Every user in the Army would have access to some form of communications,” Iyer said of the decision.

The Army is transitioning away from the current Defense Enterprise Email system that is set to expire in March 2022 as the Department of Defense adopts remote work-capable back-office enterprise systems across the military. It’s been branded as DOD365 — and Army 365, in the Army’s case — as the system is largely based on Microsoft’s popular Office 365 product, but with additional cybersecurity measures in place.

The DOD created its first remote work platform based on Microsoft cloud software with the creation of the Commercial Virtual Remote environment, a temporary measure to allow remote work during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition to Office 365 tools was started years ago through the development of the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) cloud contract. The DOD sunset the CVR environment over the summer in anticipation of moving users to the more robust 365 environments.

Iyer said he came to his decision to buy fewer licenses than the number of personnel after he spoke with enlisted soldiers on his recent travels, concluding that many in the Army don’t use their email tools or prefer other communication methods like chat. Iyer said data shows that about 150,000 Army email inboxes had not been accessed by users over the past six months.

“Giving everyone a full-fledged Office license is not the best way to go, because it is way too expensive,” Iyer said. “Depending upon the role that you are in, you are going to get a certain type of software to get your job done.”

In the place of Office 365 licenses, the Army is working on an alternative email-only solution to provide email services to anyone who wants them, he said, adding that those alternatives might not be Microsoft-based.

Iyer estimates the Army will save $150 million by segmenting which services users are given. That money is going to be redirected to implement the service’s zero-trust strategy and new cybersecurity tools to allow users to access email and office tools from non-government devices.

While some users will be on different email systems, especially until Defense Enterprise Email sunsets next year, “there should be no issues with them communicating with each other,” Iyer said, because the Army established a global address directory database to ensure seamless connections across the different systems.

In November 2022, the Army is going to be moving to a consumption-based pricing model for services that Iyer hopes will save even more.

BYOD; cloud-enabled

Iyer told FedScoop the Army is also developing a Bring Your Own Device policy that will allow soldiers, civilians and contractors to use their own laptops and phones to check email when working remotely. The Army is going to prioritize reservists and National Guard members in fiscal 2022 so they are not forced to report to a government building just to check email.

By moving to a BYOD policy, more people will have access to email and collaboration tools, and save money on device purchases, Iyer said.

“Once we get a BYOD solution in place, we no longer need to procure laptops,” he said.

On top of this, the Army is moving its email infrastructure to the cloud. Making these new systems cloud-based means the service’s email can bypass the DOD’s Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), Iyer said.

Instead of in on-premise data centers, the systems will be hosted on the Army’s cARMY cloud system, supported by the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA).

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A top Navy IT official had said the department planned to migrate 472,000 of its personnel to the system known as Flank Speed by Oct. 1, but so far only 334,000 users have been moved over. The new environment is the Navy’s version of “DOD365,” a collaboration suite of tools based on Microsoft Office 365 that features enhanced security measures for both telework and in-office tools, such as email and other back-office software.

The Navy plans “to migrate approximately 138,000 remaining users in the coming months,” a Navy spokeswoman told FedScoop.

It’s unclear what happens to those still being migrated, as many were supported through an instance of Office 365 on the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). That instance sunsets Oct. 1, according to the Navy. It’s unclear if there are other instances of Office 365 available to users to support their work.

The DOD launched its first department wide telework environment at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, the Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) environment. The system was also based on Office 365 cloud-based software but was not authorized to handle sensitive data.

The Pentagon’s effort to build a modern suite of collaboration tools, which includes Microsoft’s Word, One Drive and Teams video calling, has been ongoing since 2019 with the initial award of the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract to General Dynamics IT-owned CRSA in August 2019, before being re-awarded in Oct. 2020 to the same company.

Each service hosts its own cloud tenancy in the DEOS system, with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) managing non-combat support agencies’s back-office systems under the contract. The first users to DOD365 were onboarded in the beginning of 2021 and the temporary CVR was decommissioned in June.

Part of the enhanced security Flank Speed offers is an implementation of some of the zero-trust principles that senior IT leaders have been pushing. Zero-trust systems operate on the principle that they have already been breached and should limit the movement of networks users until they are authenticated — giving them “zero trust” on the network.

“It’s secured. It is cloud-based, like CVR. But in a very secure and defendable place where CVR had a couple of holes,” Mike Galbraith, Navy’s chief digital innovation officer, said in June of Flank Speed. He added the Navy is “weaving that thread of security through everything — securing our data, securing our devices, securing our networks and our transport.”

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Creating CVR was a feat by government standards, with millions of users brought online in a matter of weeks when the pandemic first sent much of the workforce home in March 2020. CVR gave users access to Microsoft Teams and other basic collaboration tools. It was a telework environment born of necessity, and is now being replaced by a more robust version of Office 365 dubbed “DOD365.”

The new platform offers much of the same capabilities as CVR with the ability to do work up to impact level five (IL 5), a jump up from CVR’s max of IL 2 data, and store documents in the OneDrive cloud.

“The rapid stand up of Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) marked the turning point to the way DoD approaches IT challenges and showed the value of the close working relationships that have been established over the last few years,” John Sherman, acting CIO, told FedScoop in a statement.

At its hight, CVR had nearly 1.5 million users chatting, video calling and sharing documents on the system across the military. It brought novel capabilities to the DOD workforce, which until 2020 rarely could work from outside of military installations. Since early 2021 DOD has been onboarding users on to DOD365 to try and smooth the transition. It’s unclear how many users are on the envionrment now. DOD also recently expanded the number of types of devices that can access the platform.

Part of what got CVR up and running so fast was a telework task force of military department CIOs that convened to surge resources to CVR. The task force was led by then-CIO Dana Deasy and met daily at the onset of the pandemic, the DOD said at the time.

A small office within the DOD CIO’s office, the Cloud Computing Program Office, worked “24 hours a day, seven days a week” in the first two months to get the cloud space needed to run the environment.

“It is the Thursday that never ended because it was the day that never ended for us,” she said in December, retelling the story of March for the first time.

CVR was not without its limitation. Only IL 2 work could be done on the system and its capabilities were rudimentary compared to the full suite of tools many private sector companies offer. It also operated on a security waiver in order to be stood up so fast.

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The goal is to be able to sync up more features, including a link between email and calendars. The focus on enterprise integration comes as the Navy was able to use more funding to modernize its telework and other enterprise systems during the pandemic. The Department plans to move to a Microsoft 365 suite that will provide the kind of integration it wants, along with hitting other modernization initiatives.

“We are really seeing a glimpse of the future in this core set of capabilities” in Microsoft 365, Andrew Tash, chief architect at the Department of the Navy, said during the Department of the Navy’s IT Conference Wednesday.

The department had initially planned to transition to a long-term teleworking solution similar to the current Commercial Virtual Remote environment, based on some Microsoft Office capabilities. The original goal was mid-December, but now the Navy is focused on building out a Microsoft 365 integrated platform that also has enhanced security features by June 2021.

The new telework technology is also prompting modernization across the department, officials have said. One example is that the Microsoft Office 365 suite is pushing the Navy to move away from using its intranet —  the Navy Marine Corps Intranet — to a network-as-a-service model. The department is also working to have greater intermeshed capabilities across platforms with its new single-cloud tenant policy.

“We have a cloud-tolerant architecture in place, but we need to get to a cloud-native architecture,” Tash said.

The goal is by 2021 to have as many services as possible be digital and cloud-native to support both teleworking and in-person needs once more workers can come back to bases and the Pentagon.

“We are moving to the cloud and we need everyone to get on board with the strategy,” Tash said, adding that while many parts of the Navy are all-in on cloud and telework modernization, there needs to be more unification in their efforts. “Disparate” efforts have not yielded the results Tash has hoped for, he said.

Integration could also mean new means of identity management. With capabilities nesting in one Microsoft 365 suite, users may not need a CAC card for some activities, such as quickly checking email. Procedures that require more security — like approving purchasing orders — still will rely on swiping cards for authorization, Tash said.

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“It’s the NSA culture, since the vast majority of our work is highly classified, you know, by default, we operate on our top-secret network,” Smithberger said this week on an INSA webinar. “That’s sort of where we’re most at home. And we hadn’t always thought about whether there were pieces of that that really could be done at a less-classified level because there didn’t seem to be much of a barrier to entry when we were all going to be going to our offices and, you know, working on a high-side network and our corporate partners were all going to be working on a top-secret network with us.”

Top secret work will probably never be fit for telework, Smithberger said, but, forced by the pandemic, the NSA is finding more work can be done via telework.

“It’s kind of become more of a standard for us to see how much we can actually do in a less protected environment to leverage our ability to work with some corporate partners who, in some cases, simply don’t have access to a SCIF but are fully cleared people,” he said. “In other cases, we’re building a sort of a variation on this environment, where we’re going to be doing a lot more collaboration with people who don’t have clearances for the capabilities mission, for NSA’s cybersecurity mission, for our research.”

Really, the roots in this move started long before COVID-19. About four years ago, the NSA began developing what Smithberger calls “a very protected low side development environment” in the intelligence community’s Commercial Cloud Services, supported by Amazon Web Services.

“We wrapped lots of security around it,” he said. “And we built a model of NSA’s high-side mission environment that sort of fakes the classified pieces and started doing development in this environment with our corporate partners. So we’ve actually been doing this for about three or four years. The revelation about five months ago was we’d actually designed this so well, that there was no additional risk allowing people to work from home in this environment.”

There’s also the option to work with classified information through remote work, which the NSA does not treat as one-and-the-same as telework. Smithberger said NSA has “lots of ability to work remotely with people within our classified networks” at sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs) and other cleared facilities.

However, that requires having access to that secured network. For instance, contractors or NSA personnel working on the agency’s GovCloud would require such a direct network connection and couldn’t be done by telework.

“It only lives in the top-secret environment… It is top secret and only top secret,” Smithberger said. “So there will never be telework from home into the IC GovCloud.” But, there are “classified facilities around the intelligence community, frankly, around the world,” he said, that feed into GovCloud through top-secret networks.

And even in the cases where NSA personnel are still required to commute to an office, they’re still working in a virtual manner, which Smithberger is shifting NSA away from its “culture of face-to-face meetings.”

“Although there’s a limit to how many of our people can, you know, work from home and telework, all of our meetings within NSA facilities are now virtual,” he said. “So I get in the car and I commute to work, I put my mask on to walk through the hallways, I go to my office, and I sit through virtual meetings all day long. And I put my mask back on and go back to my car and drive home.”

Smithberger added: “We’ve learned that we can be a lot more effective and efficient, you know, operating virtually even in our classified environment. And then the unclassified things and the telework that opens up.”

To that end, the agency is also working with Microsoft to onboard Office 365 at all classification levels. NSA is sponsoring Office 365’s top-secret authorization, something Smithberger hopes to achieve in the next year.

It’s NSA’s intent that this is all here to stay, the CIO said. “Everything that we’re doing right now is in the nature of permanent change…If we stand it up, we intend to use it and use it on an ongoing basis.”

“I think for NSA and the way we interact with our industry partners, [it’s a] permanent change, a lot more remote, a lot more virtual,” Smithberger said. “You just need to keep track of what needs to say classified and what doesn’t.”

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The trio of CSRA — now owned by General Dynamics IT — Dell and Minburn, a Virginia-based Microsoft reseller, created a contractor teaming agreement to secure the winning bid for DEOS, short for Defense Enterprise Office Solutions.

Together, they will provide Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based collaboration and email services to the Department of Defense under a blanket purchase agreement. In that respect, Microsoft is the big winner under the contract.

The contract runs for a base of five years with two two-year options and one one-year option.

“DOD’s cloud strategy includes both general-purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds. DEOS is a great example of a fit-for-purpose cloud that supports our multi-cloud strategy,” DOD CIO Dana Deasy said in a statement. “DEOS will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings.”

Specifically, under the contract GDIT will provide the Office 365 suite of services, to include “productivity tools such as word processing and spreadsheets, email, collaboration, file sharing, and storage,” according to a release. The contract will move to replace disparate legacy back-office systems, like the Defense Enterprise Email, across the DOD to unify services and agencies departmentwide on a single platform in the cloud. The goal is to give personnel access to applications and tools they need in remote and often austere locations.

“The Marine Corps looks forward to the promise and substantial benefits that DEOS presents with its capabilities. We are hopeful that it will supply the ability to operate within the disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth (DDIL) environments that are anticipated in 21st-century conflicts,” Marine Corps Deputy CIO Ken Bible said in a statement.

The DOD brought in GSA to lead the acquisition with its IT contracting expertise via IT Schedule 70. The ultimate hope is that DEOS can perhaps serve as a springboard for a similar contract for civilian agencies.

“DEOS demonstrates our shared commitment to maximizing the buying power of the entire federal government,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy. “It will bring cost savings and help DOD easily share mission-critical information across all military services while enhancing cybersecurity and reducing costs.”

DEOS is just one of DOD’s high-profile cloud acquisitions its undertaking. There’s also the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract worth up to $10 billion. Unlike DEOS, awarding that contract has proven to be a bumpy road for the DOD, which has had to continually defend its acquisition strategy in court against pre-award bid protests. Microsoft is also a top contender for JEDI, along with Amazon Web Services.

There’s also DOD’s on-premises cloud environment, milCloud 2.0, which the department also awarded in 2017 to CSRA, which again is now a GDIT subsidiary.

Notably, Dell and GDIT have worked together before providing the Office 365 platform to the military. The three joined up in 2017 for the Air Force’s $1 billion Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) program — a continuation of the 2015 Collaboration Pathfinder initiative to deploy Office 365 for airmen. Air Force CIO Bill Marion said earlier this week that CHES will be rolled into DEOS.

Deasy said DOD has learned from past pilots across the services to inform the acquisition of DEOS.

“The journey to the cloud has been, and will continue to be, an iterative learning process,” Deasy continued. “All lessons learned from pilot programs and the department’s early cloud adopters have been rolled into this solution. DEOS takes advantage of technical, security and contractual lessons from these ongoing pilots, while military services are leveraging them to assess the readiness of their infrastructure to support migration to DEOS,”

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The move is part of the military branch’s $1 billion Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) program — a continuation of the Air Force’s $296 million Collaboration Pathfinder initiative to deploy Microsoft Office 365 with email, productivity and communications tools across the service, as well as the Defense Logistics Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Dell EMC, Microsoft and General Dynamics are supporting the massive contract, awarded in 2017.

“This is one of the world’s largest Microsoft Office 365 deployments,” said Col. Doug Dudley, commander of the Air Force Network Integration Center (AFNIC), the team leading the development. “We’re driving the Air Force strategy to capitalize on commercial industry IT services, allowing our Airmen to focus on operating and defending cyberspace.”

The email migration represents just the first phase of the project. The Air Force is also working to give the same users a Microsoft Office 365 instance of Skype for Business, as well as SharePoint Online and OneDrive capabilities in the near future. And after that, the AFNIC team will turn its focus to bring the same cloud capabilities to the Pentagon, Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, and the Air National Guard, according to a release.

The migration also required a great deal of security work for user validation. The Air Force Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Networks Program Executive Office had to build a trio of physical security stacks to verify users’ identities before accessing any cloud-hosted data. The plan is to move those physical stacks to the cloud in the future.

“The initiative, called Zero-Stack, will increase security for users by giving authentication processes access to more robust cloud architecture that scales on demand, while decreasing the need for the Air Force to maintain on-premises server racks that perform as security stacks,” says a release authored by the Air Force Materiel Command.

The project teams, moving forward, are working to develop a roadmap for other services to adopt, like Microsoft Teams and Groups, and whatever comes next.

“One of the benefits of transitioning to cloud-based commercial services is that it not only allows us to take advantage of current offerings, but it provides a foundation across the Air Force and Department of Defense to leverage future Microsoft Office 365 collaboration services,” Markus Rogers, AFNIC executive director, said in a statement.

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