The DOD currently maintains more than 2 million Microsoft 365 E5 licenses across two separate programs — the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) and the Enterprise Software Initiative (DOD ESI). Through the established contracts, Pentagon components can purchase software licenses for commercial Microsoft products, including Office 365 applications and other collaboration tools.

But ongoing efforts spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have prompted the Defense Department to review how many of those licenses it actually needs, Katie Arrington, who is performing the duties of Pentagon CIO, told DefenseScoop.

“Our Microsoft 365 contract [is a] very big contract here in the Department of Defense. Does every individual in the Department of Defense need an [E5] license? Absolutely not,” Arrington said June 6 in an exclusive interview.

With the department’s Deputy CIO for the Information Enterprise Bill Dunlap, Arrington has been working alongside her DOGE representative to review individual position descriptions and multi-level securities to determine what level of Microsoft 365 E5 license that person needs, she said. Other criteria being considered include user and mission requirements for office productivity software, as well as collaboration capabilities, a DOD CIO spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

CSRA, which is owned by General Dynamics IT, has served as the lead integrator for the DEOS contract since 2020, when the company received a 10-year blanket purchase agreement from the General Services Administration and Defense Department. The program allows Pentagon components to purchase individual licenses for cloud-based Microsoft 365 email and collaboration tools on a monthly basis.

Although the GDIT-led team, which also includes Dell Marketing and Minburn Technology Group, initially received the award in 2019, the department was forced to re-compete the contract following two bid protests by competitor Perspecta. The procurement battle resulted in the GSA and Pentagon giving the contract to GDIT at an estimated value of $4.4 billion — much lower than its originally projected $7.6 billion value.

The department can also purchase licenses for software products — including from Microsoft and other vendors, such as Oracle — using an Enterprise Software Agreement (ESA) contract vehicle, which is managed by the DOD ESI. Instead of buying individual licenses through DEOS, an ESA is used to purchase software via resellers in bulk and on an annual basis.

Arrington did not say how many Microsoft licenses are on the chopping block, but emphasized that the effort is geared toward “optimizing the licenses that we have.”

A reduction in E5 licenses would be yet another cut to the Pentagon’s IT enterprise prompted by the department’s work with DOGE. Along with reductions to its civilian workforce, the Defense Department has ordered several of its IT consulting contracts be cancelled and replaced by internally sourced services — an action also being taken by some of the military departments, as well as the DOD CIO.

“On an average day we would probably put out a contract for consulting on how to optimize or automate the RMF. We didn’t do that. We went internally. We did it ourselves, and we’re going to use our partners in the industry to help, because they would be the beneficiaries,” Arrington said, referring to her ongoing push to overhaul the Pentagon’s Risk Management Framework (RMF).

The office is also reviewing its contracts with systems integrators to ensure there are no duplicative efforts underway, as well as pushing for more use of commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities, she added.

Despite challenges that may come from DOGE-inspired cuts, Arrington said that she believes the work will help the Pentagon be on a “level playing field” moving forward.

“[The Defense Department] is as energized as I’ve ever seen it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no concern,” she said. “Change is hard, but it’s definitely needed.”

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Microsoft Office 365, which is used widely across the U.S. military since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, now supports secret-level workloads across the Defense Department.

The cloud computing giant announced Wednesday that 365 now meets the cloud security requirements set under DOD’s Impact Level 6, which allows cloud vendors to work with the department’s classified data up to the secret level.

During the early days of the pandemic, DOD rolled out what it called Commercial Virtual Remote, or CVR, a Microsoft Teams-based virtual work and collaboration environment that allowed the department to continue work remotely. Then, in 2021, DOD sunset CVR, transitioning to a higher security, long-term office productivity environment dubbed DOD365 based on a more robust version of Microsoft Office 365.

The Defense Information Systems Agency revealed Thursday, after Microsoft’s announcement, that it would begin piloting DOD365-Secret, a classified version of the collaboration environment, with military services and defense agencies.

“DOD365-Sec will provide the tools for warfighters to operate ahead of the adversary and meet their missions anytime, anywhere while bringing consistent capabilities across the networks,” DISA said in the announcement, adding that testing will begin Jan. 30.

Given the DOD’s expansive use of Microsoft’s productivity and collaboration tools, the availability of Office 365 at the secret level is significant in that Defense officials can now collaborate and remotely work on classified materials in the cloud. Prior to this, those officials were limited to working with sensitive but unclassified matters on Office 365 applications.

“Secure cloud productivity tools can enable greater operational capabilities for our service members wherever they are. This new environment will run the latest enterprise-grade Office 365 Secret productivity, security, compliance, and collaboration applications,” Paul Lorimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Office 365 enterprise and cloud engineering, wrote in a blog post.

He continued: “With highly sensitive data, it is vital to ensure data is secure and controlled across multiple applications, devices, and workloads. We worked closely with our government partners to develop a secure and trusted infrastructure to aid this mission-critical workload shift from on-premises to the cloud.”

This new availability of Office 365 builds on Microsoft’s existing Azure Secret and Top Secret infrastructure-as-a-service environments, which the DOD will look to leverage under its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). Microsoft was one of four vendors awarded spots on the $9 billion JWCC acquisition vehicle to provide commercial cloud capabilities to the U.S. military.

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The update to the cloud-based system was announced by Army CIO Raj Iyer on LinkedIn Monday. The new policy will allow soldiers to sign documents, potentially giving them greater flexibility to work remotely with the suite known as Army365.

The department decided to accept the related risk by using monitoring tools to audit the downloading of documents, Iyer said.

“When we initially rolled out Army365 we were not ready to address the Cybersecurity risks associated with allowing users to download/ upload files from your personal devices,” Iyer wrote on LinkedIn. “We now have a solution that we are currently implementing to enable you to do just that.”

The new all cloud-based Office 365 software replaces the Army’s current on-premises email system run by the Defense Information Systems Agency, known as Defense Enterprise Email, which is slated to shutter in March.

In a follow up exchange with FedScoop, Iyer clarified that the change is departmentwide. The Department of Defense CIO has adjusted the system’s cloud tenant configuration, and the Army implemented the new access through its instance of the work suite.

The change was sparked by complains from soldiers that they could not download documents to sign and then re-upload.

“[W]e heard your feedback loud and clear. The inability to download and digitally sign PDF files and forms from Army365 Email using your personal devices has been a pain for many of you – especially for the Guard and Reserve,” Iyer wrote in the LinkedIn post.

The rollout for the Army’s email system has been paired with a pilot allowing guardsmen and reservists to be able to use A365 on their personal devices. The goal has been to allow soldiers that only report to armories for drill time to be able to stay connected to their email while not connected to an Army network.

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The Office 365-based system gives sailors, Marines, civilians and contractors access to Microsoft Teams, chat and remote-based work systems. The project, called Flank Speed, represents the Navy’s version of a broad new cloud-based DOD365 remote and in-person suite of tools that provides a similar experience to the Commercial Virtual Remote environment created for the pandemic, but it has enhanced security measures that can handle information at the military’s Impact Level-5.

“The Navy has successfully enabled accounts for all users originally intended to have access to the Flank Speed collaboration capabilities in [fiscal 2021]. Full migration of remaining users throughout the Navy will continue through the rest of [fiscal 2022],” a Navy spokesperson said.

Some related tasks are incomplete. Users that remain in an on-premise Navy email system must still be migrated to O365’s email system. A Navy spokesperson said the department plans to move the last 272,000 email accounts to the Microsoft Office email system by the end of the fiscal year.

As of now, 200,000 users have been fully migrated to both the collaboration platform and the cloud-based email system. The old system users are being moved off of is an on-premise email system run by the Navy.

The Navy had missed initial deadlines in its migration when 138,000 users had yet to be transferred — or “enabled” in the Navy’s terms — to the new collaboration tools by Oct. 1. Now that all users in the department have access to the Microsoft tools, the next step remains moving them to the cloud-based email system that will give them a new “us.navy.mil” address, according to the spokesperson.

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