Oracle cloud regions approved to handle secret-level data for Pentagon

The company announced that three of its classified, air-gapped cloud regions received accreditation from the DOD to handle workloads at Impact Level 6 (IL-6).

By Billy Mitchell

April 23, 2024

The Oracle logo on an office building in Irvine, California. (REUTERS / Mike Blake)

Oracle has added its name to the short list of cloud vendors approved to handle classified, secret-level data for the Pentagon.

The company on Monday announced that three of its classified, air-gapped cloud regions received accreditation from the Department of Defense to handle workloads at the secret level — what the department refers to as Impact Level 6 (IL-6).

The achievement comes after Oracle last August also earned a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information accreditation from the intelligence community. With both that and the latest secret-level cloud authorization, Oracle is approved to handle government information at any classification level in the cloud.

“America’s warfighters must have the world’s preeminent technology and our taxpayers insist that technology is delivered at competitive costs. Oracle is bringing both to the Department of Defense’s Secret networks,” Rand Waldron, vice president of Oracle, said in a statement. “Technology no longer sits outside the mission; technology is a part of the mission. In austere locations with limited communication, and in massive secure data centers, Oracle is bringing our best capabilities to serve the men and women that defend the U.S. and our Allies.”

While the news comes most to the benefit of the DOD, which is expanding its use of cloud in the classified space and at the edge through its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, it ultimately puts Oracle on a level playing field with its top competitors in the federal cloud space — Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which have all earned secret and top secret accreditations ahead of Oracle. Google announced its accreditation at the secret and top-secret levels just two weeks earlier.

Notably, it is those companies that Oracle is vying against for DOD task orders under its $9 billion JWCC cloud contract. Those companies also hold spots, with IBM, on the intelligence community’s multibillion-dollar Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, which requires work at the secret and top-secret levels as well.