Cloud Exchange 2025: Air Force’s Keith Hardiman on reducing cloud complexity, introducing FinOps

BlackHays

1 day ago

Originally published Cloud Exchange 2025: Air Force’s Keith Hardiman on reducing cloud complexity, introducing FinOps on June 20, 2025 15:44 by https://federalnewsnetwork.com/cloud-computing/2025/06/cloud-exchange-2025-keith-hardiman-on-overhauling-air-forces-cloud-strategy/ at Federal News Network

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The Department of the Air Force is revamping its cloud strategy to accelerate cloud adoption and build out hybrid and edge computing environments. It expects to release the revised strategy in early fiscal 2026.

A main goal of the strategy is ensuring that airmen and guardians can access secure and resilient cloud services in contested theaters like Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The strategy builds on progress the service has already made transitioning from limited cloud use to a more robust multicloud architecture, said Keith Hardiman, director of enterprise information technology for the service.

While the shift to a multicloud environment has improved readiness, operational efficiency, resiliency, reliability and data accessibility, it has also introduced a lot of complexity, Hardiman said during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2025.

Reducing cloud complexity across Air Force

“We have challenges to a certain degree with data integration and the need for stronger governance, but we’re looking to avoid a lot of those things by having that strategy in place where we can reduce the duplication of services and those inefficiencies,” he said.

Cloud One, the department’s existing multicloud environment, is central to this transition. The platform provides mission application owners with fast and secure access to cloud computing technologies and services, Hardiman said.

“It allows us to host unclassified workloads and mission critical applications and ensures that we’re able to scale, provide resiliency, reliability and security. It also helps us focus on streamlining operations and reducing inefficiencies from our legacy systems that we’ve had in the past,” he said. “I would say this approach not only accelerates our decision-making apparatus but also helps enable collaboration — not only across the Air Force but across the services as well.”

Migrating Air Force financial systems to the cloud

The service has migrated more than 50 applications to Cloud One, but the current focus is onboarding financial systems as part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to achieve a clean audit.

Hardiman said the service is working to migrate approximately 16 systems by the end of fiscal 2025.

The department is also implementing a financial operations (FinOps) framework to forecast cloud spending, minimize waste and ensure efficient allocation of resources to support both business and mission operations.

“We’ve been adopting a FinOps approach, particularly with Cloud One, as we centralize some of our framework where we’re reducing duplication,” Hardiman said. “We’ve also, as a department, mandated the use of Cloud One for all our unclassified workloads, and that’s actually increased some of the throughput there.”

Integrating AI to improve Air Force operations

As the service continues to mature its hybrid and multicloud environment, it is also laying the groundwork to integrate artificial intelligence as a way to enhance operations across the enterprise.

One of the service’s major efforts is the development of its Enterprise Generative AI as a Service, which will support a wide range of mission-focused and enterprise-level applications through a centralized storefront.

“The way we’ve been thinking about it is, how can we best utilize or find the best value or benefit of AI? We’ve looked at it through the lens of the warfighter: How can we find different methods to enhance lethality, ubiquitous connectivity and our cyber optimization resilience and through utilizing and leveraging AI?” Hardiman said.

“We think we can take that capability in line with zero trust requirements that we have to foster adaptability, innovation and mission support, and we can do agile software development, accelerated cloud development, and then look at how we really want to plan the network of the future.”

The service is also standing up a new Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, which will “shorten the timeline between prototype and mission adoption by bringing together the personnel, resources and authorities to create operational efficiencies, develop policy to break down barriers and speed AI adoption.”

Discover more articles and videos now on our Cloud Exchange 2025 event page.

Originally published Federal News Network