Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC Update)–All Systems Go and Ready to Launch
What is the JWCC?
The JWCC was a successor to the $10 billion Project JEDI which was cancelled following lengthy legal delays imposed on the program by lawsuits brought forward by Amazon. It’s a 5-year, $9 Billion contract for jobs spanning unclassified, secret, and top-secret cloud services and was jointly awarded to four of the major cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The only guaranteed allocation to each of the four providers was $100,000, which provided the DoD with complete flexibility on selecting which of the four providers best matched the requirements for any of the specific projects.
Ensuring that the Cloud Providers Meet JWCC Requirements
Back in March, the DoD awarded $ 3.8 million to each of the four cloud providers to enable the JWCC Program Management Office to perform research and proof-of-concept (POC) testing to validate that several JWCC requirements could be met in each of the cloud providers environments.
Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is All Systems Go and Ready to Launch
Earlier this month, a memo from the Pentagon CIO John Sherman was released to the public where he’s instructing Government agencies to begin moving all available workloads onto JWCC, including Secret and Top-Secret. Sherman is instructing organizations to move to the new JWCC platform as soon as any existing contracts expire. This is a major milestone for the project and is surprisingly quick given that the POC testing environments were provided just a few short months ago.
Which Cloud Providers are Getting the Business?
Lt. General Skinner didn’t provide details on which vendors were awarded task orders and how much each were worth, however reviewing several government spending tracking agencies revealed some interesting information. –
If you do the math it indicates that Amazon hasn’t been awarded any funding beyond its initial $3.8 million allocation, Google has received around $22 million, Oracle around $64 million, and Microsoft around $110 million.
Bottom Line:
Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project appears to be launching, which is a huge distinction between it and its predecessor Project JEDI. We are still very early in the roll out stages of the JWCC project, but early indications of how the dollars are being allocated may indicate which of the cloud providers are best meeting the needs and requirements of JWCC.
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