Navy ramping up Neptune cloud efforts

Fiscal 2025 will see the Department of the Navy scale up its Neptune Cloud Management Office initiative, according to the executive director of program executive office digital.

The plans are part of a broader effort by the DON and Department of Defense writ large to embrace the cloud as a key element of information technology modernization.

The Neptune office was formally established in 2023 and has two components: one for the Navy and another for the Marine Corps. The latter had a head start, and the former was up and running near the beginning of fiscal 2024.

“That’s an office we stood up in PEO Digital to bring together the cloud service management functions that the DON cloud policy assigned to us, which basically say, have a single point of entry where anyone can discover available cloud services not limited just to what we do in PEO Digital — it’s inclusive of what we can get across DOD and even federally — and then help them to consume those cloud services quickly, easily, at best value,” PEO Digital leader Louis Koplin said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

“When we stood up Neptune, we were just getting the Navy effort going. So we’ve been staffing up over the course of the fiscal year [in 2024]. But we do have a revised portal up and it’s now iterating on a biweekly basis [with] sprints,” he told DefenseScoop. “That is where we’re starting to vector everything together.”

The office is set up to function as a “concierge service” for digital offerings.

The intent is to offer not just infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-service, but also all the enterprise services, he noted.

“We have things like Naval Identity Services, which I mentioned for ICAM … They’ve got the Naval Integrated Modeling Environment for model-based systems engineering. And you know, things like Jupiter, which is the DON subtenant of Advana from DOD CDAO, and the Marine Corps Bolt, which is a sub-subtenant. So we’re making some progress,” Koplin said.

“It took us a while to … get that first iteration going as the team came together. But now everyone’s in place and I think we’re moving pretty well. And for fiscal year ‘25 coming up, we’re really lifting our target and looking at how we start to migrate and modernize workloads at scale. So we need to start moving those through and across the full range of options. It’s not just Azure, AWS — it’s Google and Oracle, it’s Appian and Pega … and Salesforce and ServiceNow. And it’s really everyone who has an offering is welcome to the marketplace. And we’re going to do our best to make sure that people are matched up through a concierge service with the right solution,” he added.

There’s no competition between Neptune and other DOD cloud efforts such as the Air Force’s Cloud One or the Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency’s cArmy or Platform One, according to Koplin, who noted that his office also works closely with the Defense Information Systems Agency on efforts related to the Pentagonwide Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program known as JWCC.

“We’re one community, we’re trying to get all the mission owners to where it makes sense for them to go. There’s no pride of ownership … Everyone’s just at the table trying to get the work done,” Koplin said.