Finally, the Pentagon Cloud Computing Enterprise Advances

The Defense Department just announced a $9 billion enterprise cloud contract, which it thinks corrects problems that led to the cancellation of its predecessor, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, after years of awards, objections, revisions, and delays.

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, or JWCC, has been given to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, as opposed to the single-vendor JEDI award, which was challenged and ultimately abandoned. According to John Sherman, the chief information officer for the Defense Department, each vendor is given a guarantee of $100,000 and will subsequently submit bids for task orders.

Having direct access to these cloud service providers without going through a middleman or reseller, he claimed, is what this delivers.

All four suppliers must be able to offer services at the unclassified, secret, and top-secret levels in order to fulfill the terms of the contract, which has a three-year term with two option years, he said.

We do have other kinds of clouds in the department, he continued, "but none of them span the full enterprise from the continental United States up to what we term the tactical edge at all three security classification levels."

According to Defense Information Systems Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, the tactical edge may be where cloud computing capabilities are most needed.

We are able to make better decisions because of this data and the applications that are producing the right information at the right time and level. but also gives us that tactical edge," he said.

Warfighters "need to be able to collect and process data at the point of need," according to Sharon Woods, head of DISA's Hosting and Compute Center, rather than backhauling data to higher levels for processing. As opposed to requiring a backhaul, JWCC "takes cloud and shrinks it into a smaller form factor that becomes portable, and that can go with the warfighter," she said.

Despite the fact that the multi-vendor award should exclude a complaint of the contract, Woods said that competitors could protest specific task orders. She noted that in an ideal world, task order awards would be made by government evaluators in a matter of weeks to months, "but we need to work through the intricacies, and we'll learn as we go in the beginning."

In order to actualize the enterprise computing capabilities of joint all-domain command and control, Sherman highlighted that JWCC will act as a "binding element." He claimed that the contract represents both a cultural and a technical revolution.

Both changes could be challenging for a department that has had trouble embracing new technology in the past, according to Teri Takai, a former chief information officer for the Defense Department, in an interview.

The agency will need to concentrate more on data standards. For that data exchange, she said, "they're going to have to put up norms and ground rules."

The department has struggled with data for a long time, she claimed. Working with cloud providers, who each have their own policies and programs for migrating data, will make the problem much more difficult to solve.

Some cloud applications are vendor-specific, the task order process may be time-consuming, and switching from one cloud provider to another may be difficult, among other difficulties.

The final issue is that they still need to determine how to effectively manage usage, she added. To prevent spiraling expenses, she continued, a system to monitor cloud usage will be necessary.

Furthermore, she added, it's unclear how much use tactical edge operators would make of cloud services just yet.

However, she emphasized that switching to the cloud is a crucial step. "The DoD must continue to advance in line with the development of technology. However, it doesn't make anything simpler or any easier. It simply means that they now have to deal with an additional layer of complication.