Pentagon will ‘open the door’ to more companies for next major cloud contract

The Defense Department’s sequel to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract it awarded in 2022 will target more than the four major hyperscale cloud service providers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle — that won the first contract back in 2022.

Speaking Thursday at the ATO and Cloud Security Summit, Defense Department Chief Information Officer Katie Arrington said JWCC Next will “open the door” to smaller cloud service providers and non-traditional companies “that generally wouldn’t be involved in the [DOD] and our world and trying to bring them in and figure out ways we can incorporate them.”

“We are looking to expand the aperture,” Arrington said. “Competition breeds innovation, competition breeds efficiency.”

The Defense Department and its components currently purchase a wide variety of cloud services through the JWCC contract. Several months ago, the department began developing requirements for JWCC Next, which would share similarities with ...