DOD Reaches 1M Users on Cloud E-mail

More than two years after commencing its push toward enterprise e-mail, the U.S. Department of Defense now has one million users on a consolidated private cloud e-mail platform.

The milestone means that DOD Enterprise Email (DEE) is now one of the largest independent e-mail systems in the world.

Enterprise services reduce costs by consolidating system hardware requirements and maintenance, eliminating unnecessary and inefficient administration and resource allocation, which means the military services and defense organizations using enterprise services can save money in IT services to preserve resources for their primary mission – according to Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of Defense Information Systems Agency (News - Alert) (DISA).

“For the warfighters, using DEE means wherever they are, they can use their email, whenever they need it. It is not necessary to start a new email account when you move or deploy. It is as mobile as the service member,” Hawkins said in a statement.

With new organizations migrating to DEE, the system is expected to reach 1.5 million users by late summer, DOD officials said.

The DOD e-mail hosting program aims to reduce the cost of e-mail to about $50 a user, and will help to save the Army $380 million over a five-year period, according to a report submitted by the Enterprise Email Army Service Acquisition to Congress last year.

The Army is in the final phase of its migration to DEE – according to Mike Krieger, the Army Deputy Chief Information Officer/G-6 – and has migrated 967,000 user accounts to date.

In August 2012, the U.S. Army announced that DISA surpassed the half-million user milestone for the DEE. The program aims to bring all of the DOD into the same unified Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange-based e-mail system, hosted in DISA’s private cloud.

The project began in earnest in April 2010 when the Army began a plan to consolidate its e-mail systems along with much of its other network services, integrating the Army’s more than 440 networks in the U.S. alone under a single Global Network Enterprise Construct.