WASHINGTON \u2014 The Pentagon\u2019s top IT official said Wednesday that the department\u2019s new enterprise cloud contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, remains on schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The department has laid out a quicker timeline to award the contract to vendors after the preceding enterprise cloud, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, was delayed by protests for several years, preventing the Defense Department from filling what leaders called an urgent, unmet need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe remain on schedule to get out … our solicitation on or about 15 October in just a couple of months,\u201d the Pentagon\u2019s acting chief information officer, John Sherman, said at a FedScoop event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract will be a multivendor, multi-award project \u2014 a different approach than the single award for the JEDI cloud project. The department plans to release an initial solicitation in mid-October, and it will consider bids from Microsoft and Amazon, the two finalists from the JEDI contract, Sherman said in July. Microsoft has won the JEDI contract twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Wednesday, he reiterated that the department is still targeting April 2022 for vendor awards. The department is having ongoing conversations with other major cloud providers \u2014 Google, IBM and Oracle \u2014 about the Defense Department\u2019s requirements and the companies\u2019 capabilities. In July, Sherman has told reporters: \u201cIf we determine that additional vendors can also meet our requirements, then we will extend solicitations to them as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The JWCC contract would allow troops to access data in the unclassified, secret and top-secret classification levels from the enterprise down to the tactical battlefield environment. Sherman and other military leaders have emphasized that the enterprise cloud capability is critical to enabling the department\u2019s Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept to securely pass data from sensors to war fighters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability [is] a fundamental pillar of how we\u2019re supporting what JADC2 is going to become,\u201d Sherman said. \u201cThis has been an urgent and unmet requirement to have those enterprise cloud capabilities at all three security levels from conus [the contiguous United States] all the way up to the tactical edge in a DDIL [denied, degraded, intermittent or limited] environment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The JWCC contract will be worth billions of dollars, but the Pentagon has not specified a final amount. As of July, the department expected the JWCC contract to have a three-year base period and two one-year options. Sherman anticipates a full and open competition in 2025 for contract awards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Pentagon is following a quicker timeline to award the cloud contract after the preceding project, the JEDI cloud, was delayed several years and then abandoned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":39454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":19,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[160,36,19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3340],"class_list":["post-19292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-newsletters","category-pentagon"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"NHYBT4A2DFARBNYWPGJTSBZMSU","arc_canonical_url":"\/battlefield-tech\/it-networks\/2021\/08\/25\/it-leader-new-dod-enterprise-cloud-contract-remains-on-schedule\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n