UNCLASSIFIED 1. Operational Challenges at the Tactical Edge The OCONUS environment presents unique challenges in meeting warfighter and mission owner requirements based on geographic location, mission set, partnerships, and operating conditions. Every warfighting asset, including the warfighters themselves, is a potential producer and/or consumer of information. This information must be accessed, analyzed, and distributed to enable data-driven decisions at the speed of relevance. Operating effectively in theater requires persistent access to data sources and producers within a transient, dynamic, and often contested environment. The most significant challenge OCONUS users face is access and sharing information in Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent, or Limited (D-DIL) environments. This challenge is further complicated by the reliance on reach-back to CONUS to access data repositories, analytical technologies, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (Al/ML) advancements for the production of more precise, impactful information and thereby, advancing more informed decision making. Hostile cyber actors will continue using technical and non-technical means to attempt to defeat the cloud's cybersecurity safeguards, access data and information, and interfere with or disable systems. An adversary's capabilities will evolve over time to become more lethal and elusive. It is essential that every DoD cloud employ world-class cybersecurity capabilities to continuously overmatch the threat. Valuable data collected and stored locally in theater to support mobile mission sets are often disconnected from broader CONUS-based data repositories, impeding the ability of geographically separated forces to process and correlate perishable information. The joint battlespace requires innovative approaches to cloud resources to ensure data is available at the point of need. At the tactical edge, use of cloud computing requires secure information sharing through human-to-human collaboration, human-to-machine teaming, and machine-to-machine data exchange while remaining, secure, redundant and available to the warfighter. 2. DoD OCONUS Cloud Vision Enable dominant all-domain advantage through cloud innovation and resilience. Cloud computing can help solve today's national defense challenges, but its true potential is to solve tomorrow's challenges. These challenges will require a Joint Force capable of quickly and decisively maneuvering and mobilizing air, land, sea, space, and cyber capabilities in response to adversaries threatening U.S. and Allied National Security priorities and objectives. Collaboration across these domains, increasingly enabled by high-tech, software-driven solutions, must occur at the global point of need, at the tactical edge, and at the fight. These collaborative efforts can't happen without a modem and resilient OCONUS infrastructure, of which cloud computing and zero trust principles are fundamental. The DoD OCONUS Cloud Strategy establishes goals and objectives specifically focused on delivering cloud innovation forward to the tactical edge with the intent of achieving the following outcomes: 1