Pentagon surpasses $600M in JWCC task order awards
The Department of Defense has awarded more than 80 task orders for its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability with a total value of more than $600 million, according to a senior official.
JWCC is the Pentagon’s high-priority enterprise cloud effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the $9 billion JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders.
The initiative is a key element of the department’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to enable better and faster decision-making and more effective and efficient operations.
“We are trying to continue on our journey for cloud. We awarded the JWCC contract. We had a memo put out that said all of the services [and] agencies need to rationalize their contracts for consuming cloud and move to JWCC at first opportunity. So that’s been going well. We’ve had 84 [task order] awards to date, and totaling $628 million,” David McKeown, DOD’s deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and senior information security officer, said Wednesday at DefenseTalks, presented by DefenseScoop.
McKeown did not provide a breakdown of the task order awards by company.
“We’re also working a lot on edge computing. We’ve got a couple of joint operational edge nodes in [Indo-Pacific Command] that we’re doing a lot of tests on. And then of course, DISA has got their own on prem cloud that they offer for the DOD called Stratus. So lots of cloud work there [that’s] continuing to evolve and mature. And it’s very important for the department,” he added.
