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(c)iStock.com\/DanielBendjy<\/em><\/p>\n IBM has secured a major cloud customer win in the form of the US Army with a potential $62 million (£50.3m) contract over five years, the company has announced.<\/p>\n The deal, which is designed for the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, is for the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) program and comes under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract, which is an ‘indefinite delivery’ deal which started on December 31 last year and expires exactly five years later.<\/p>\n Alongside building the infrastructure, the deal will also see infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings provided by IBM. The Armonk giant expects the Army to migrate up to 35 of its current applications to the private cloud in the coming 12 months.<\/p>\n “With this project, we’re beginning to bring the IT infrastructure of the US Army into the 21st century,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell, US Army CIO in a statement. “Cloud computing is a game-changing architecture that provides improved performance with high efficiency, all in a secure environment.”<\/p>\n “Clients today are increasingly looking at the cloud as a pathway to innovation,” said Sam Gordy, IBM US federal general manager. “This IBM Cloud solution will provide the Army with greater flexibility and will go a long way toward mitigating, and, in some cases eliminating, the security challenges inherent with multiple ingress and egress points.”<\/p>\n IBM’s classification of impact level 5 (IL-5) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) enables this project to go ahead. The Army expects IBM to achieve DISA IL-6 certification in the coming year; the IL-6 is the highest possible level of security and enables IBM to work with classified information up to ‘secret’.<\/p>\n