KUALA LUMPUR (Dec 8): The US Department of Defense (Pentagon) has awarded the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability—or JWCC—contract, with Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle each receiving an award, which has a $9 billion ceiling.
In a statement on its website on Dec 7, the Pentagon said it aims to bring enterprisewide cloud computing capabilities to the Defense Department across all domains and classification levels, with the four companies competing for individual task orders.
“The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge.
“The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will allow mission owners to acquire authorized commercial cloud offerings directly from the Cloud Service Providers contract awardees. Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is a multiple award contract.
“The work will be performed in Reston, Virginia. The estimated completion date is June 8, 2028,” said the Pentagon.
JWCC itself was announced in July 2021 following the failure and cancellation of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure—or JEDI—contract.
Conceptualised in 2017, JEDI was designed to be the Pentagon’s war cloud, providing a common and connected global IT fabric at all levels of classification for customer agencies and warfighters.
A single-award contract worth up to US$10 billion, JEDI would have put a single cloud service provider in charge of hosting and analyzing some of the military’s most sensitive data.
Ultimately, JEDI was delayed for several years over numerous lawsuits that ultimately caused the Pentagon to reconsider its plan, opting for a multi-cloud approach more common in the private sector.
Meanwhile, NextGov, a US federal technology and cybersecurity news and best practices portal reported that for many years, Amazon Web Services—by virtue of its 2013 contract with the Central Intelligence Agency—was the only commercial cloud provider with the security accreditations allowing it to host the DOD’s most sensitive data.
It said that in the interim, however, Microsoft has achieved the top-secret accreditation, and Oracle and Google both achieved Impact Level 5—or IL5—accreditation, allowing the two companies to host the department’s most sensitive unclassified data in their cloud offerings.
JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud contracts the government has awarded over the past few years. In late 2020, the CIA awarded its Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies: AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.
Meanwhile, in an email to theedgemarkets.com, an AWS spokesperson said the company was honored to have been selected for the JWCC contract and looked forward to continuing its support for the Department of Defense.
"From the enterprise to the tactical edge, we are ready to deliver industry-leading cloud services to enable the DoD to achieve its critical mission," the spokesperson said.