Department of Defense Chief Information Officer John Sherman, Defense Information Systems Agency Director U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, Department of Defense Deputy CIO for Information Environment Lily Zeleke, and DISA Hosting and Compute Center Director Sharon Wood hold a press briefing on the Department of Defense’s award of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Dec. 8, 2022. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Alexander Kubitza)
WASHINGTON — All four vendors who won a spot on the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, worth up to $8 billion, have been awarded the first batch of task orders under the effort, a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) spokesperson told Breaking Defense.
According to the spokesperson, each of the vendors — Amazon Web Services, Google, Oracle and Microsoft — received equal task orders, with the value of each task order being $3.8 million to essentially do some early poking and prodding about what JWCC could be capable of.
“The first task orders awarded under the JWCC contract allows the JWCC Program Management Office to test cloud service offerings in a sandbox environment, validating several JWCC requirements through real world cloud consumption (e.g., proof of concepts, verification of policy-based controls),” the spokesperson said.
The task order was awarded on March 24, and the period of performance includes a one-year base period and two one-year option periods.
DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner mentioned the award briefly today during the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on cybersecurity hearing.
“We just awarded the first task order last week and many others are working through the process,” Skinner said.
Last December, DoD awarded the four vendors a spot on the multi-cloud follow up effort to the infamous single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract which was scrapped in 2021. The new multi-vendor effort is meant to provide the department with an enterprise-wide cloud capability that spans all classification levels.
DoD is also set to release secret-level offerings of JWCC in a few weeks and top secret-level offerings in the summer, Sharon Woods, director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, said March 14.
“That’s a capability we really don’t have in the department — an enterprise top secret cloud environment,” Woods said. “You know, the intelligence community does, but the department…is not able to leverage that contract and so that is one of those capability gaps that JWCC is meeting.”
She added that DoD is looking at whether the JWCC offerings can fuel individual cloud efforts within the military services. Although each service has its own cloud-focused effort, the Pentagon wants JWCC to be an option and envisions it being the foundation for Joint All Domain Command and Control, DoD’s effort to connect sensors to shooters across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace domains.
