Defense Enclave Services will be the glue that binds together the many systems of the Fourth Estate, providing shared security.
ALBUQUERQUE: Next week, DISA will release the final solicitation for Defense Enclave services, its ambitious plan to modernize networks across the Department of Defense’s sprawling Fourth Estate. The contract, valued at $11.7 billion, is expected to be awarded in December 2021.
The DES solicitation was initially promised for September. That the final release is coming three months later, indicates DISA’s desire to get the contract right the first time.
“This is an incredibly important endeavor that we are embarking on,” said Danielle Metz, DISA’s acting deputy CIO for information enterprise. “it is one of the crown jewels as far as our IT reform initiatives.”
Metz’s remarks came on Thursday as part of a media roundtable, held in conjunction with AFCEA’s 2020 TechNet Cyber conference. DES’s stated mission is to provide a single, modernized network to serve every agency in the Department’s vast and fractured “Fourth Estate” — essentially, all the various agencies and entities don’t belong to the five armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Marines). The objective is to achieve both security and efficiency at scale, making it easier to use information on military networks and at the same time easier to protect it.
“We thought that a little bit more due diligence was important in order to make sure that we were doing what was right for the department,” said Metz. “That’s the reason for not the delay but for the review.”
The scale of the DES contract is massive for an IT program, drawing frequent comparison to the similarly large Pentagon’s JEDI cloud initiative. Both are single-sourced, though Metz cautioned against drawing further comparison between the two programs.
“Both DES and JEDI complement each other,” said Metz, “by improving networks, which is what DES is focused on, which will enable better access to cloud services, which is what JEDI was going after.”
It remains to be seen if the DES contract award will be as contested as the award for JEDI, where a protracted protest process for the contract has slowed implementation.
