Irakli Gedenidze | Reuters The Pentagon said Tuesday it plans to award up to $ 9 billion in cloud infrastructure contracts in December, about eight months later than expected. The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC, represents a new direction for the US military that would rely on multiple cloud providers rather than one. This was the strategy that the Pentagon initially sought to use under the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The Pentagon completed the award of the contract to Microsoft before canceling it. “We recognized that our program was perhaps a little ahead of schedule and that we would now end up in the fall and plan to award it in December,” said John Sherman, the Pentagon’s chief intelligence officer. officer, he told reporters. In July 2021, when the JWCC announced, the goal was to award contracts only in April 2022, Sherman said. The Pentagon still expects the contracts to have a three-year base period and a two-year selection period. Then, Sherman said, the Pentagon would launch “a full and open tender for a future multicloud acquisition.” The JEDI contract would be worth up to $ 10 billion in 10 years. The JWCC would last five years and have a larger dollar amount during that time period. The project will be extended to all three security classifications and will operate both inside and outside the United States, Sherman said. The expectation is that the Pentagon will have access to the unregistered network when awarding contracts. The secret networks will be connected 60 days after the award of the contract and the top secret and regular top networks will be online no later than 180 days after the selection. SEE: Pentagon seeks new government contract offer after Microsoft cancels Jedi deal
