The JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will enable the US Department of Defense to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from commercial cloud service providers at the speed of mission
AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle awarded $9bn JWCC contracts by the US DoD. (Credit: Touch Of Light/Wikipedia.org)
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded $9bn worth contracts to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) programme.
According to the department, the JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will enable it to directly procure commercial cloud capabilities and services from the commercial cloud service providers (CSPs) at the speed of mission.
Under the contract vehicle, the CSPs will deliver globally accessible, enterprise-wide cloud services across all security domains and levels of classification to the department.
The work under the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle is expected to be complete by 8 June 2028.
The JWCC programme will enable warfighters to acquire various cloud capabilities under one contract.
The capabilities include centralised management and distributed control, elastic computing, storage, and network infrastructure, advanced data analytics, fortified security, tactical edge devices, commercial parity, and others.
In November 2021, the DoD sought bids for the JWCC programme contracts from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
The JWCC programme is a replacement for the $10bn joint enterprise defence infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract that was awarded to Microsoft in 2019.
The JEDI cloud contract was scrapped in July 2021 as it did not address the department’s evolving needs, increased cloud conversancy, and other requirements.
In August 2022, the DoD chose data infrastructure artificial intelligence (AI) provider Torch.AI for its software for the System for Insider Threat Hindrance (SITH), a new cyber and insider threat analysis capability.
SITH was developed by Torch.AI with the DoD chief digital and AI office’s (CDAO) directorate for digital services (DDS).