Page 3 - FCW, July/August 2018

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Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud solicitation hits the street
The Defense Department has released the long-awaited final request for pro- posals for its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program.
In a statement accompanying the document, DOD CIO and project lead Dana Deasy called JEDI “an initiative that will revolutionize how we fight and win wars.”
The JEDI cloud is being designed to speed the flow of data and analysis to combat troops. “In the absence of modern services, warfighters and lead- ers are forced to choose between [for- going] capabilities or slogging through a lengthy acquisition, rollout and pro- visioning process,” according to the statement of work. “A fragmented and largely on-premises computing and stor- age solution forces the warfighter into tedious data and application manage- ment processes, compromising their ability to rapidly access, manipulate and analyze data at the homefront and tactical edge.”
Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said: “JEDI Cloud is an acquisition for foun- dational commercial cloud technologies
that will enable warfighters to better exe- cute a mission that is increasingly depen- dent on the exploitation of information.”
Despite objections from industry, DOD officials are sticking to a single- award plan for the contract. Howev- er, the final proposal includes several changes from previous drafts. Most notably, bidders are not required to
on-premises cloud, AWS is far ahead of the rest of industry when it comes to hosting classified data.
Despite those modifications, vendor protests appear likely.
“This continues to be a wired speci- fication,” said John Weiler, executive director of the IT Acquisition Advisory Council. “No other vendor can meet
$1.1B
is being added to the ceiling for DOD’s electronic health record contract
“No other vendor can meet this combination of requirements,
and Amazon knows it.” — JOHN WEILER, IT ACQUISITION ADVISORY COUNCIL
have accredited classified cloud envi- ronments when submitting a proposal but must be able to meet the cybersecu- rity standards within 30 days of award for unclassified, 180 days for secret and 270 days for top-secret data.
The classification standards appear designed to assuage the fears of some potential competitors that the JEDI project is being designed with Ama- zon Web Services in mind. As the contractor for the CIA’s $600 million
this combination of requirements, and Amazon knows it.”
Lawmakers have also been skepti- cal about the acquisition’s purpose and impact. In the final conference report for the 2019 defense spending bill, they stipu- lated a mandatory review of the program and asked for details about how it will affect existing cloud programs, such as milCloud 2.0. DOD submitted a review report to Congress in May.
— Lauren C. Williams
FCW CALENDAR
8/15 Cloud
8/17 Industry
CACI International’s Mike Lewis and former CSRA CEO Larry Prior will discuss the ways mergers and acquisitions
reshape the government contracting landscape at this Washington Technology Power Breakfast.
Vienna, Va. washingtontechnology.com/ powerbreakfast
9/11 Identity management
ACT-IAC’s Identity and Access Management Forum will explore the group’s report on identity, credentials
and access management and present success stories from federal and state agencies.
Washington, D.C.
is.gd/FCW_icam
OMB’s Bill Hunt, NIST’s Robert Bohn, the Army’s Thomas
Sasala and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.’s Pamela Wise- Martinez are among the speakers at FCW’s cloud event.
Washington, D.C.
FCW.com/HybridCloud
July/August 2018 FCW.COM 3