26th October, 2019
“The JEDI Cloud contract will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defense business and mission operations,” the Defense Department said its description of the contract.
The project is scheduled to be completed in October 2029.
The entire contracting process, which involved bids from companies like Google, Oracle and IBM, was steeped in controversy over the past few months.
First, Google dropped out of the race after employees petitioned against the contract, raising concerns over the ethics of supplying its technology to the military.
That theory was reportedly similar to one created by Oracle’s executive vice president, Ken Glueck, along with one of the company’s Washington lobbyists. Oracle had also raised similar concerns in a December lawsuit against the Defense Department, claiming that the Pentagon’s requirements for the contract were created in a way that favored Amazon, making it easier for the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant to win the bidding process.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill also got involved in the process in recent weeks, sending letters to the president requesting for the contract to be delayed until officials could examine the awards process.
“This contract has already been delayed a year for investigations and court filings,” two Republicans wrote in one letter. “Further delays make DOD fall behind and DOD needs this technology now. The cloud makes the military a more lethal, agile and innovative force.”
One letter, from 12 House Republicans, was dated the same day Mark Esper assumed his role as secretary of defense.
The winner was supposed to be announced earlier, but the process was delayed after US President Trump voiced concerns about the fairness of the competition.
The Department of Defence announced the JEDI project to place Pentagon technology systems into the cloud in early 2018. Media reports said that JEDI would make it easier for the information infrastructure of the US military to transfer and integrate data sets, as well as make global security upgrades to software across platforms.
“The DOD Cloud Initiative is part of a much larger effort to modernize the Department’s information technology enterprise. The foundation of this effort is rationalizing the number of networks, data centers and clouds that currently exist in the Department,” DOD spokeswoman Heather Babb said about the project in 2018.
*With background report by verge.com
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