The US Department of Defense (DoD) is initiating a new enterprise cloud service which will serve the joint force while cancelling another.
The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) is being launched to support warfighters providing joint all domain command and control (JADC2). This will be in addition to the DoD’s artificial intelligence and data acceleration initiative (ADA).
“We are launching what we call the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, which will be based initially on direct awards to fill our urgent, unmet requirement for a multi-vendor enterprise cloud spanning the entire department in all three security levels with availability from CONUS to the tactical edge, at scale,” said John Sherman, acting chief information officer.
The DoD is initially looking at two ‘hyperscale’ cloud services providers – Microsoft and Amazon Web Services – although it is likely that IBM, Oracle and Google will also be approached at some point. According to the DoD: “While neither of the two companies will automatically win awards, it’s expected that by October both companies will receive direct solicitations from the department requesting proposals on how they might participate in JWCC.”
The DoD is looking to contract the service by April 2022. It will take the form of “a multi-award, multi-vendor cloud solution with a performance period of no more than five years, consisting of a three-year performance base period and two one-year option periods.”
By 2025 it is planned that the cloud service will be running across the DoD enterprise.
The DoD is also cancelling the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which “was developed at a time when the department’s needs were different and our cloud conversancy less mature,” stated Sherman.
by Andrew Drwiega
