Pentagon wants greater visibility into cloud spending with JWCC Next overhaul

The next iteration of the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract will provide more clarity into how much and where it is spending on cloud tools and services, according to Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies.

The Defense Department intends to release a solicitation for the program — dubbed JWCC Next — in early 2026, with plans to award contracts in early 2027. Officials have previously stated that the follow-on effort will increase the number of companies on the contract, as well as expand the types of vendors who could be tapped for the program beyond traditional hyperscale cloud service providers.

As it takes lessons from the current JWCC program while looking ahead, the Pentagon wants more visibility into the costs of cloud services, Davies told members of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity.

“One of the key areas that we need to be looking at from a multiprong approach is, is this the most efficient way to be driving cloud compute? It’s not. … Is it the best way to see the spend? It is not,” she said at a hearing Tuesday. “JWCC Next is going to provide us that financial transparency that’s there.”

In 2022, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded spots on the 10-year, $9 billion JWCC contract vehicle. The program allows for each of the vendors to compete for task orders and deliver cloud computing, storage and other services across the department.

JWCC Next, however, will expand the program into a unified cloud marketplace, Davies said. The model would let Pentagon users directly browse, acquire and deploy pre-approved cloud tools from even more providers.

The department also wants to embed automated financial operations and multi-cloud management into the program, which would allow officials to have more control over costs across the vast amounts of ongoing contracts, Davies noted.

“It’s also going to provide [Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency] and his team the ability to do better defense across all this, because we’re going to know where all of the cloud compute is and that’s key for us in asset identification and asset security,” she said.

Although the first JWCC contract was set up as a 10-year vehicle if all options were executed, the Pentagon plans to replace the current program with JWCC Next once awards are given in 2027. As of August 2025, more than $3 billion in task orders have been awarded.