Mr. John Sherman, Acting Department of Defense Chief Information Officer participates in a virtual panel with Billington Cybersecurity at the Pentagon, April 15, 2021 (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s chief information officer is developing new guidance on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) in an effort to ensure getting the best mission outcome and value for its dollar instead of “running on autopilot,” he told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview.
And while Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman made clear that his intent isn’t to override individual cloud efforts from the military services, the vision he articulated would effectively set JWCC as the primary cloud option that serves as the “absolute foundation” for Joint All Domain Command and Control.
Sherman said the goal isn’t “to do something that kicks the legs out from under the fit-for-purpose cloud efforts in the Navy, Air Force and Army such as Cloud One and [the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency],” saying the services have done great work in their individual efforts. Those efforts are ongoing: for example, the Army in October released a plan on how it will leverage its cloud and launched a new $1 billion cloud effort called the Enterprise Application Migration and Modernization contract.
But despite those service-level efforts, Sherman wants to make sure the Pentagon implements JWCC “in a smart way” with it serving as the keystone of all cloud efforts — which would, by default, seem to require the smaller service- based efforts to take a secondary role.
“Very likely I’m going to be signing out some guidance in the next couple of months here about how I expect the enterprise to leverage JWCC in terms of what must go in there and where are some other areas that could [have] some flexibility,” Sherman said Jan. 27.
“I’m not gonna do anything capriciously or just with a sledgehammer here,” he said. “This will be with a surgical knife about where things need to go, and…if I was my boss, I would expect the CIO to be doing this and make sure the government is getting the best value for our dollar and the very best mission outcome. And that’s why rather than just let this kind of run on autopilot, there is going to be some guidance about how this works.”
JWCC, a multi-vendor, multi-cloud contract to build out the Defense Department’s key military cloud computing backbone, is meant to provide DoD “with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” according to an official department statement. The contract is a follow up to the infamous single-source canceled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract and spans all classification levels — unclassified, secret and top secret.
Under JWCC, four vendors — Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services — will have to compete for individual “task orders,” with the first task order rolling out sometime this quarter of this fiscal year.
“Consider it cloud rationalization,” Sherman said of the new guidance. He added that since JEDI, “things have evolved in the services for example…But I also want to — as any good CIO of an enterprise this large would have — there’s got to be cloud discipline and rationalization in terms of where we drive workloads to the contracting process, and we’re gonna do this smartly.
“What I don’t want to have happen is we have unintended proliferation of contract activity, either through resellers or elsewhere, where we could use JWCC as the main procurement mechanism where it makes the most cost sense and best mission effectiveness,” he said. “But we have to do this smartly in a way that it makes cost sense and also we don’t get into things like data exfiltration fees and stuff like that, and there’s a lot of detail, but that’s why we’re doing this is to make sure that this is rationalized and we’re getting the best bang for the buck and best mission outcome.”
