The U.S. Department of Defense has confirmed that it has terminated a $10 billion contract with Microsoft for cloud computing.
The statement said that the department has determined that, due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) Cloud contract no longer meets its needs. The department continues to have unmet cloud capability gaps for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services at all three classification levels that work at the tactical edge, at scale, and these needs have only advanced in recent years with efforts such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration (ADA) initiative, according to the department.
Now that the $10 billion contract with Microsoft is canceled, the Pentagon plans to move forward with new cloud efforts. The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) will be a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. The department intends to seek proposals from a limited number of sources, namely Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, as available market research indicates that these two vendors are the only cloud service providers (CSPs) capable of meeting the department’s requirements. However, the department will immediately engage with industry and continue its market research to determine whether any other U.S.-based hyperscale CSPs can also meet the department’s requirements. If so, the department will also negotiate with those companies, the statement said.