Technocrat | February 11, 2019: JEDI Leads the Way

February 08, 2019 02:11 PM
By Bloomberg Government

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What’s New This Week:

JEDI Leads the Way

Things had been fairly quiet on the JEDI front since the Government Accountability Office denied Oracle’s bid protest of the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud contract. In return, Oracle filed a pre-award injunction with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims back in December. Now, finally, there’s been a big development in this ongoing saga.

On Feb. 4, the Defense Department released an all-encompassing cloud computing strategy with plans for the JEDI program. Although cloud computing has been on the Pentagon’s agenda for several years, CIO Dana Deasy said it has never had a comprehensive strategy until now.

JEDI will play a key role in aggregating and analyzing data in a common repository, as well as providing computer power to personnel in the U.S. and those deployed overseas. In addition to JEDI, the Pentagon wants to make use of “fit-for-purpose” clouds for specialized missions. BGOV’s Chris Cornillie has your exclusive take on what’s ahead for the Pentagon’s cloud programs.

In a separate announcement, the DOD released a draft solicitation for its immense cloud back-office email and collaboration platform. The details are fuzzy, but likely bidders for the $8.2 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract include Microsoft and Google.

Speaking of Microsoft—which submitted a bid for JEDI in October—the tech giant had news of its own, perfectly timed with the Pentagon’s cloud strategy, when it unveiled new products that can enable its Azure Government cloud in connectivity-limited places.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has been promoting the Snowball Edge, a similar device that can help the military collect and analyze data in remote locations.

Looks like everyone is trying to jump on the military cloud train as the DOD prepares to award the JEDI contract later this spring. The agency has been vocal about the fact that it requires “tactical edge computing for the warfighter,” so vendors with those capabilities will have a major selling point.

There’s more news where that came from, so keep reading!

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“Imagine a world where we can take that compute power with new applications on top of it and put the cloud right into the hands of the tactical fighter on the edge. That’s why the cloud is so important to us.”

—Dana Deasy, CIO at the Department of Defense

Read more in this week’s exclusive from Bloomberg Government.

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