Since May, the Defense Department has more than doubled the number of approved commercial cloud computing providers.

The military services and agencies now have more than 50 vendors to choose from to buy commercial cloud services at low and moderate security levels.

That’s a good start for DoD.

“For low-risk stuff, we actually access those clouds over the internet. When we move into moderate risks, we’ve actually worked direct connects into the commercial providers,” said Rob Vietmeyer, DoD’s government lead and strategic adviser to the chief information officer on enterprise cloud computing, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop on Sept. 15. “In commercial data centers, we can do our network peering. We’ve tied it into our perimeter defense for our Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) environment so we can firewall and filter for some of that traffic so we can protect the NIPRNET from any of the threats that may originate in that cloud environment.”

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