The U.S. Department of Defense is canceling the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud infrastructure contract awarded to Microsoft in late 2019.
In a press release, the Pentagon said the existing JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs due to evolving requirements. However, the DoD "continues to have unmet cloud capability gaps for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services at all three classification levels that work at the tactical edge, at scale -- these needs have only advanced in recent years with efforts such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration (ADA) initiative."
"JEDI was developed at a time when the Department’s needs were different and both the CSPs technology and our cloud conversancy was less mature. In light of new initiatives like JADC2 and AI and Data Acceleration (ADA), the evolution of the cloud ecosystem within DoD, and changes in user requirements to leverage multiple cloud environments to execute mission, our landscape has advanced and a new way-ahead is warranted to achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains," said John Sherman, acting DoD Chief Information Officer.
The DoD will now open a new, multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract and said it will seek proposals from Microsoft and AWS, since "available market research indicates that these two vendors are the only Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) capable of meeting the Department’s requirements."
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded an enterprise general-purpose cloud contract valued at up to $10 billion to Microsoft.
The DoD said the contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern cloud infrastructure at all three classification levels delivered out to the tactical edge. The contracting process began two years ago and considered four different offerors.
The Pentagon said it is committed to a strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.
“The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform,” DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said. “The DOD Digital Modernization Strategy was created to support this imperative. This award is an important step in execution of the Digital Modernization Strategy.”
