Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are amongst the largest cloud service providers in the world.
When faced with a confusing moment of choosing the best cloud service provider, the U.S. Department of Justice seems to avoid being lost between its decision.
This is why the Pentagon announced in a press release, that all four tech giants have each been awarded a cloud computing contract that could be worth up to $9 billion each through 2028.
All four technology companies have won contracts for providing indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ. What this means, they can include an indefinite amount of services for that specified period of time.
"The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with globally available, enterprise-wide cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic to the tactical edge," the Department of Defense said.
The aim for this collaboration, is to power what's called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC.
It's meant to use a hybrid cloud computing system to link the U.S. military’s most remote edge with its farthest headquarters, bridging unclassified, secret and top-secret classifications. Before this, no such ability exists, officials said.
In its own words, JWCC is an "enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge."
JWCC is seen as the successor to the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure endeavor, or JEDI, which was awarded to Microsoft alone and was ultimately ditched in July 2021.
JEDI was a failed project, and was cancelled when a legal battle ensued as Amazon challenged the Pentagon’s decision in choosing Microsoft.
And Amazon's feud with the Donald Trump's administration literally tainted the $10 billion project.
Then in 2021, the Pentagon changed its approach, in which it started asking for bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle to meet its cloud needs. That happened despite the General Services Administration said that only Amazon and Microsoft appeared to be able to meet the Pentagon’s requirements.
The Department of Justice initially invited all four companies to compete for the deal in 2021.
Awards for JWCC were previously expected in April, but that timeline was unrealistic amid what Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman said was a heftier-than-expected workload.
Sherman said that additional due diligence was required before closing, but later told the U.S. Congress that implementing JWCC was a top priority.
The Defense Department is trying to institute JWCC as pressure builds to more effectively process and pass information to forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber, a notion known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.
"The JADC2 strategy articulates DoD's approach for advancing Joint Force C2 capabilities necessary to support U.S. national security interests. The National Defense Strategy directs the Joint Force to 'gain and maintain information advantage, particularly in cyberspace, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum,'" summarized the Department of Defense in March 2022 (PDF).
It's worth noting though, that there is no single provider that excels in all criteria.
This is why an increasing number of companies have also sought to rely on more than one cloud provider. In some cases, they rely on specialized capabilities of one provider, and leave the front-end and back-end workloads to other provider. Other times, they are cost decreases.
Having more than one cloud can increase organizations’ confidence in their ability to withstand service disruptions caused by outages.
And this is exactly what the Department of Defense is doing.
JWCC is in line with the U.S. Department of Defense’s effort to rely on multiple providers of remotely operated infrastructure technology, rather than on a single company, a strategy promoted during Trump's administration.
Among the four companies chosen, Oracle is seen as the underdog.
Oracle earned $900 million dollars In cloud infrastructure revenue in the quarter ended August 31. 2022, whereas Amazon Web Services, which is considered the largest of them all, earned a staggering $20.5 billion during the same period.