The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) last week awarded its first task orders under its new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) enterprise cloud computing program, with each contractor getting an initial slice of the pie.
The task orders to Google [GOOG], Oracle [ORCL], Amazon Web Services [AMZN] and Microsoft [MSFT] are worth up to $3.8 million each and work began on March 24, DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center told Defense Daily on Wednesday. The task orders have a one-year base period and two one-year options.
“The first task orders awarded under the JWCC contract allows the JWCC Program Management Office to test cloud service offerings in a sandbox environment, validating several JWCC requirements through real world cloud consumption (e.g., proof of concepts, verification of policy-based controls),” DISA said in an email response to questions from Defense Daily.
The task orders were disclosed by Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of DISA, during a Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday morning.
The $9 billion JWCC program is aimed at giving the Defense Department globally-available cloud services across all classification levels and for all warfighting domains. The JWCC contract was awarded in December.
More task orders are working through the process, Skinner told the panel.
“Additionally, we’ve initiated pilots to enable outside the continental United States cloud access, leveraging both commercial as well as government solutions inside our overseas data centers,” he said. “To help facilitate the rapid adoption of cloud, we’ve deployed several accelerators. We streamline the cloud adoption process from a normal 45-day timeline to within hours or minutes. This is helping to accelerate our pace to the cloud to improve our overall user experience, while also increasing our cybersecurity.”