The Department of Defense (DoD) is providing some insight into the first task orders awarded under the DoD’s $9 billion multi-vendor cloud contract, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC).
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) – the defense agency overseeing JWCC – made four initial awards for cloud services under the JWCC contract vehicle, two to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and two to Microsoft.
AWS received the sole source contracts for a joint DoD intelligence community edge cloud pilot and a public key infrastructure initiative in the secret cloud. Microsoft received two sole source task orders for enterprise messaging (EM5) and an enterprise email security gateway pilot.
As part of the JWCC program, each vendor participating in the program – Google, AWS, Oracle, and Microsoft – must compete on individual task orders that are rolled out in batches.
However, the exception to this rule is that “only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.”
For example, with Microsoft’s sole source contract for EM5, it was the only cloud service provider “that [met] the requirement of multiple regions providing geo-redundancy dispersed locations” on IL6 – a high-level security classification for data and information systems within the DoD.
“The only source capable of performing the EM5 at the level and quality required is Microsoft based on Microsoft’s multi-region infrastructure for IL6,” DISA stated.
DISA did not provide any specifics regarding the values of the task orders.
DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner announced that the Pentagon awarded 13 task orders totaling more than $200 million under the JWCC contract earlier this year, nine of which are associated with the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control.
Since his announcement, DISA has awarded more than 17 JWCC task orders.
