Use case analysis for adopting cloud computing in Army test and evaluation

Abstract

Cloud computing in theory can reduce the total IT lifecycle cost for the US Department of Defense by enabling the enterprise to provision shared software-, platform-, and infrastructure-level services in an on-demand pay-as-you-go fashion. One of the hurdles faced by the Department of Defense is that of developing an enterprise-wide strategy and policy for migrating the enterprise's data and applications to the cloud. This thesis supports the formulation of such a strategy and the accompanying policy by providing a concrete example of how the standard workflow processes used across the US Army test and evaluation programs can be modified to take advantage of cloud computing. The thesis presents a Use Case analysis of the existing collaboration and communication that takes place in these processes, focusing on three specific workflow processes--rogram management, report collaboration, and de-confliction of contention for test and evaluation resources--that could be improved upon through the use of cloud-based collaboration and communication services. Our results indicate that the cloud-based collaboration and communication services are much better suited to distributed largescale planning, execution, and reporting of program test and evaluation than those used in the existing test and evaluation workflow processes. The thesis also provides recommendations on migration to cloud computing, how some of the results from this thesis are applicable to the entire Department of Defense enterprise, and suggestions for follow-on research.