Sharon Woods, director of the hosting and compute center at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said the Department of Defense intends to release in the coming weeks secret-level bid offerings to four companies that secured spots on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.
In December, DOD awarded Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle positions on the potential $9 billion JWCC contract.
The extension of these offerings will ostensibly enable each of the four vendors to know more about the Pentagon’s requirements and make a proposal.
“That’s a capability we really don’t have in the department – an enterprise top secret cloud environment,” Woods said at an event Tuesday.
“You know, the intelligence community does, but the department…is not able to leverage that contract and so that is one of those capability gaps that JWCC is meeting,” she added.
Woods noted that the department expects to issue top secret-level offerings in the summer and that the first task orders under the cloud contract are also “in the pipeline.”
She stated that DOD is looking at whether offerings under JWCC could help drive cloud initiatives of individual service branches.
“But separate from that…they’re creating their own environments, their own production environments, they’re layering on DevSecOps and tactical edge capabilities in a number of things,” Woods said. “There’s nothing about JWCC that stops them from doing that.”
