The Pentagon on Wednesday introduced the awardees of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Functionality—or JWCC—contract, with Amazon Net Providers, Google, Microsoft and Oracle every receiving an award.
By means of the contract, which has a $9 billion ceiling, the Pentagon goals to convey enterprisewide cloud computing capabilities to the Protection Division throughout all domains and classification ranges, with the 4 corporations competing for particular person activity orders.
Final yr, the Protection Division had named the 4 corporations as contenders for the multi-cloud, multi-vendor contract.
“The aim of this contract is to supply the Division of Protection with enterprise-wide, globally accessible cloud providers throughout all safety domains and classification ranges, from the strategic stage to the tactical edge,” the Protection Division stated in a Wednesday announcement.
The awards come after a years-long effort to supply enterprisewide cloud computing throughout the division, with a big delay in March because the DOD performed due diligence with the 4 distributors.
JWCC itself was introduced in July 2021 following the failure and cancellation of the Joint Enterprise Protection Infrastructure—or JEDI—contract, DOD’s earlier effort geared toward offering business cloud capabilities to the enterprise.
Conceptualized in 2017, JEDI was designed to be the Pentagon’s battle cloud, offering a typical and related international IT material in any respect ranges of classification for buyer companies and warfighters. A single-award contract value as much as $10 billion, JEDI would have put a single cloud service supplier accountable for internet hosting and analyzing among the navy’s most delicate information. Finally, JEDI was delayed for a number of years over quite a few lawsuits that finally brought on the Pentagon to rethink its plan, choosing a multi-cloud strategy extra frequent within the non-public sector.
For a few years, Amazon Net Providers—by advantage of its 2013 contract with the Central Intelligence Company—was the one business cloud supplier with the safety accreditations permitting it to host the DOD’s most delicate information. Within the interim, nevertheless, Microsoft has achieved the top-secret accreditation, and Oracle and Google each achieved Influence Degree 5—or IL5—accreditation, permitting the 2 corporations to host the division’s most delicate unclassified information of their cloud choices. Oracle has additionally achieved high secret accreditation.
JWCC is only one of a number of multibillion-dollar cloud contracts the federal government has awarded over the previous few years. In late 2020, the CIA awarded its Industrial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to 5 corporations: AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM. The contract could possibly be value “tens of billions” of {dollars}, based on contracting paperwork, and the businesses will compete for activity orders issued by numerous intelligence companies.
Final April, the Nationwide Safety Company re-awarded its $10 billion cloud contract codenamed “Wild and Stormy” to AWS following a protest from shedding bidder Microsoft. The contract is a part of the NSA’s modernization of its Hybrid Compute Initiative, which can transfer among the NSA’s crown jewel intelligence information from inner servers to AWS’ air-gapped cloud.