The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is planning to roll out a follow-on vehicle to the current $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract in about 18 months, with the follow-on dubbed “JWCC Next.”
JWCC provides the Department of Defense (DoD) with easy access to the four hyperscale providers: Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft. However, JWCC Next is looking to provide access to other cloud providers as well.
John Hale, chief of product management and development at DISA, explained that there are about 180 additional cloud providers that meet the government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) criteria.
These cloud providers are either FedRAMP-authorized or have received a DoD Provisional Authority to Operate (ATO), which basically means they meet the extra couple of criteria for DoD consumption.
“We don’t have a way to easily gain access to those cloud providers,” Hale said on March 6 at the OpenText Government Summit in Washington, D.C. “And what we’re seeing is a lot of our mission partners are wanting multi-cloud solutions.”
Hale explained that they may want to host an application or their data in one of the hyperscale providers, “but then they also want what Salesforce offers,” or another cloud service provider.
“So, what we’re trying to do is kind of get a feel of the landscape and then hopefully come out with another way to allow access to those other providers that mission,” Hale said.
The solution, he said, is JWCC Next. This will be a multi-award contract similar to JWCC, “but at a bigger scale,” Hale noted.
“It’s going to be the follow-on vehicle that hopefully gains access to as many of the other cloud providers as possible and also gains access to one of the key features that mission partners cry for when they want to leverage cloud, and that’s the third-party marketplace,” he said.
Hale went on to say that a hyperscale provider offers a certain amount of functionality, but there’s also a “whole ecosystem of third-party providers” that are built around that hyperscale provider.
“What mission partners really want is the ecosystem built around that hyperscale provider,” he said. “They want the entire enchilada, right? And so, what we’ve provided to date is the first bite. So, really, it’s how do we evolve our contract vehicles going forward to allow access to all those other capabilities?”
Hale said that DISA just finished the requirements document for JWCC Next last month, and it now has to put together the acquisition strategy over the next two months.
“That will lay out the plan for when and how that contract goes forward. I would expect it to hit the street probably in 18 months,” he said.
