DOD eyes mid-December for JWCC award

By Briana Reilly  / November 7, 2022

TOWSON, MD -- Defense Department officials are planning to award their multivendor, multicloud enterprise solution contract by the middle of next month, following a delay that pushed the announcement back by more than half a year.

In the lead-up to the long-anticipated Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability selection, one Defense Information Systems Agency official said the organization is working to put in place what she called “cloud accelerators” that will allow the military “to not only access the contract but be able to consume cloud in a faster and smarter way.”

“We have a very high level of confidence in the mid-December award,” Sharon Woods, the director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, told reporters during a media roundtable at the agency’s forecast to industry day in Towson, MD.

Though DOD had announced the new schedule in March, it had been unclear when in December the awards were slated to come down. Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle have all submitted proposals to the department, which plans to issue ID/IQ contracts with three-year base periods and two one-year options worth up to $9 billion over the five-year span.

The awards’ timing has been in the spotlight as the movement toward an enterprise-wide offering across all three classification levels has repeatedly faced setbacks, culminating in the cancellation of the 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure effort.

The Pentagon would not be where it is at with JWCC, DOD Chief Information Officer John Sherman told attendees during the event, if not for how JEDI played out and the lessons learned there. Though he acknowledged the predecessor program was “seen as something that happened in fits and starts,” he called the undertaking “the right decision for the right time."

“We would not be here, getting ready to award JWCC in about a month, 30 days-ish from now, had we not gone through all this,” he added.

Still, the drawn-out schedule has encouraged the military services to pursue and refine their own cloud solutions, such as the Air Force’s Cloud One. DOD officials have repeatedly stated that JWCC will be a “complementary” solution to those existing options, which often act as more targeted capabilities.

Asked about that dynamic again today, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, the head of DISA, told reporters that he sees opportunities for the services when their solutions’ contracts “come up for, I’ll say, recompete or renewal” to make the switch to JWCC “if it meets their needs.”

In the meantime, Woods pointed to officials’ work to ensure future users can access JWCC and then “get themselves into the cloud within two to four hours,” including through pre-configured, pre-accredited infrastructure-as-code baselines that quickly set up a cloud environment.

She also touted the agency’s DevSecOps initiatives, which seek to inject security into development and operations, as a way to “position mission partners so that they’re not just in the cloud, but actually developing applications and updating those applications in a way that’s consistent, that’s more secure and is faster than what would happen in the absence of those kinds of support mechanisms.”

Looking ahead to the period after the initial JWCC award, DOD plans to roll out the unclassified level, followed by the secret level within 60 days and top secret and tactical edge following no later than 180 days post award, though Woods noted those timelines could shift vendor to vendor.

“Each of the vendors are in different levels of maturity, and so some vendors may deliver more quickly than others,” she said. “But those are the requirements under the contract.”