The increased use of connected technologies in the field is one of the forces driving the Pentagon to adopt a secure cloud, JEDI or otherwise.
ALBUQUERQUE: If the Court of Federal Claims does not dismiss part of Amazon’s complaint against the award of the $10 billion JEDI contract, the Pentagon may have to rethink its entire approach to secure military cloud and abandon the contract. So says a Pentagon briefing paper sent to members of Congress.
“Regardless of the JEDI Cloud litigation outcome, the Department continues to have an urgent, unmet requirement,” reads the briefing (emphasis in original.) It continues, “Specifically, the Department’s need for an enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services for all three classification levels, extending from the homefront to the tactical edge, at scale. We remain fully committed to meeting this requirement—we hope through JEDI—but this requirement transcends any one procurement, and we will be prepared to ensure it is met one way or another.”
The massive single-source contract, awarded to Microsoft in October 2019, has been stuck in litigation brought by Amazon Web Services since November 2019. A major component of AWS’s protest is an “allegation of improper influence at the highest levels of Government that, allegedly, unfairly affected the outcome of the JEDI Cloud competition.” If that part of the protest is dismissed, the Pentagon expects the remaining protests to be handled by the courts in a few months, as is regular practice for protests.
If the allegation of improper influence is allowed to remain part of the protest against JEDI, the department expects the process to take a much longer time because that would involve depositions from former senior Pentagon and White House officials.
In terms of actual spending on the program — excluding legal fees — the delay has not been especially costly, but it has meant a major slow down on delivering a capability the Pentagon says is essential.
During the delay, parts of the military, like the Joint AI Center, have turned to other, smaller military-approved clouds, like the Air Force’s cloudONE, to meet its network needs.
Already, parts of the military like DISA are exploring alternative cloud solutions. While currently pitched as a supplement to JEDI’s central role in military cloud infrastructure, the Pentagon has expressed willingness to abandon JEDI in the face of sustained protest. Should JEDI, and with it the notion of a single-source cloud for the entire department, be abandoned, the Pentagon may choose to cobble together an answer to its stated “urgent, unmet requirement” out of the offerings of smaller cloud vendors.
The Pentagon’s first choice remains that the awarded JEDI contract stand as-is, and work on building its cloud begins in earnest within two years of the contract award. Should it no longer be a viable and timely way to provide military cloud services, JEDI is likely to be abandoned. This is especially important, given the Biden administration’s proposals to increase funding for Federal IT and Cyber across the board.
As the briefing suggests, the Defense Department is no longer interested in dealing in absolutes.
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