The U.S. Defense Department had awarded cloud-computing contracts to four companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. The contracts run through 2028 and could be valued as high as $9 billion. The work is for a new cloud architecture called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, which would provide the Defense Department with cloud services across all security domains and classification levels. the marquee government contract was a big win for a wider swath of technology firms. The largest of them had pushed aggressively for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known as JEDI, which was seen as the way to transform and modernize the military’s cloud-computing systems.
JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will provide the Pentagon the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) at the speed of mission, at all classification levels, from headquarters to the tactical edge. The Pentagon is moving computing resources located on its warfighting assets such as aircraft, ships and armored vehicles to the cloud with data accessed via a secure network. This contract vehicle offers commercial pricing, or better, and streamlined provisioning of cloud services. With JWCC, warfighters will now have the opportunity to acquire the following capabilities under one contract incuding: global accessibility, centralized management and distributed control.