“JWCC requires highly skilled services to support office operations, and the delivery of modern enterprise cloud services and related technologies. These services must include technical expertise in cloud engineering, cybersecurity, financial management, program execution support, and technical writing through direct support of system owners and technical experts regarding various challenges with migration to the cloud and leveraging commercial cloud technologies,” officials wrote. 

The Department of Defense awarded its highly-anticipated enterprise cloud contract to Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in late 2022. 

JWCC marks a key element in the DOD’s push for digital modernization, and the original contract has a ceiling of $9 billion. Officials have been somewhat tight-lipped about JWCC progress since the program’s inception — but as of August 2024, the Pentagon had awarded just under $1 billion in task orders to vendors competing for the enterprise cloud initiative.

This latest defense cloud-enabling information request was published by DISA’s Hosting and Compute Directorate, which is responsible for managing the JWCC contract vehicle.

“This is a SOURCES SOUGHT NOTICE to determine the availability and technical capability of 8(a) certified small businesses to provide the required products and/or services,” officials wrote.

Such companies have gone through and been verified by a federal government-run federal contracting and training program designed for experienced small business owners who are considered socially and economically disadvantaged. 

In Thursday’s notice, DISA officials list and define associated in-demand capabilities across three categories: Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering; Cybersecurity and Risk Management; and Infrastructure and Software Engineering.

The work is envisioned to be performed at DISA facilities inside and outside of the continental U.S. The anticipated period of performance is a 1-month transition period, an 11-month base period, and four 12-month option periods.

Businesses that aim to respond must submit information including a brief capabilities statement to an email included in the notice, by July 31.

Earlier this year, DISA unveiled plans to roll out a follow-on to the current enterprise cloud vehicle — named JWCC Next — likely in 2026. A DISA spokesperson declined to answer questions Thursday regarding the motivation behind this new sources sought notice, or how it fits into the agency’s vision for JWCC Next.

“As standard practice, DISA cannot discuss open solicitations posted on SAM.gov or other sites, as it could violate established procurement regulations and policies. Therefore, we have nothing to add at this time,” the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

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The CIO’s recently released software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2025 and 2026 marks another call from Pentagon leadership for the entire department to improve delivery of software-based capabilities. The document lists three key goals for the next two years — focusing on software factories, enterprise cloud and transforming processes — as well as specific tasks for each goal that aims to improve overall software modernization.

The goals and tasks in the document build upon the DOD CIO’s first software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2023 and 2024. According to the new roadmap, the Pentagon completed 27 out of 41 of the tasks outlined in the previous plan, carried 12 tasks over to FY25 and FY26 and combined two tasks with others in the updated document.

Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer for the deputy CIO for information enterprise, said that while working through the goals in the first implementation plan, the office realized that some of the associated tasks weren’t mature enough to fully execute on.

“For a small portion, we learned that we didn’t know enough about a couple of those activities, so we dropped them. And then some of them, we were maybe over aggressive or they evolved,” he said Wednesday during a panel discussion at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference. “I’ll say, from an agile perspective, we didn’t have the user score exactly right, so some of these stories have continued into the implementation plan two.”

The first goal outlined in the new plan is to accelerate and scale the Pentagon’s enterprise cloud environment. Along with its multi-cloud, multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the department also has a number of other efforts aimed at providing cloud infrastructure overseas and at the tactical edge. 

Vietmeyer said that even though JWCC has been a relative success — noting that the department has awarded at least $2.7 billion worth of task orders under the program — the contract vehicle was “suboptimal” for large acquisitions. The CIO is currently planning for what it calls JWCC 2.0, a follow-on phase that adds more vendors and different contracting mechanisms to the program.

Beyond JWCC, the implementation plan calls for the establishment of additional contract options for cloud innovation — specifically geared towards small business and “niche providers” — that can be awarded before the end of fiscal 2026.

“In the implementation plan, we’re trying to build that next-generation cloud infrastructure and extend it. Not just looking at JWCC, but we’re also looking at how we extend for small business cloud providers,” Vietmeyer said. 

The document also offers guidance for Pentagon efforts to expand cloud access to the edge, such as through Stratus or the Joint Operational Edge (JOE) environments. In the next two years, the department will develop a reference design for an “underlying cloud mesh” that facilitates data transport, software development and information-sharing across different infrastructures overseas, according to the plan.

The mesh architecture would allow warfighters from one military service to access a cloud node operated by a different service, or one owned by the Defense Information Systems Agency, Vietmeyer explained.

“We’ve seen that one of the challenges is moving to a mesh type of architecture, so we can identify where computing infrastructure exists and allow the warfighters to take advantage [of it],” he said. “How do we start to build the ability for applications and data to scale across that infrastructure in a highly resilient way?”

Along with enterprise cloud, another goal within the updated implementation plan focuses on creating a Pentagon-wide software factory ecosystem that fully leverages a DevSecOps approach. The CIO intends to take successful practices from the various software factories in DOD and replicate them across the department, according to the plan.

“DoD must continue to scale success and bridge the right disciplines together … to ensure end-to-end enablement and realization of the software modernization vision and adoption of software platforms and factories organized by domain,” the document stated.

The CIO will also work to remove existing processes and red tape that prevents software developers from accessing critical tools and capabilities; increase the number of platforms with continuous authorization to operate (cATO) approvals; and create a DevSecOps reference design for artificial intelligence and software-based automation deployment.

Lastly, the implementation plan outlines multiple tasks geared towards evolving the Pentagon’s policies, regulations and standards to better support software development and delivery — including creating secure software standards, improving software deployment in weapons platforms and growing its workforce.

Although work to accelerate the Pentagon’s software modernization has been happening for years, leaders at the department have begun pushing for more focused efforts to remove bureaucratic red tape through new guidance — such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Modern Software Acquisition memo released in March, and the CIO’s new Software Fast Track (SWIFT) program.

“For modern practices to become the routine way of developing and delivering software, policy, regulations, and standards must be reviewed and updated,” the implementation plan stated. “DoD must work with DoD Components to update policy and guidance to reduce the barriers to adopting new practices and to accelerate software delivery and cybersecurity approvals to enable adoption of the latest tools and services.”

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Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance.

“Because the bandwidth that’s available in these pLEO satellite connections to our ground control stations is so big, we’re talking hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth with negligible latency, it makes things possible that you couldn’t do anymore. You don’t need to be persistently connected anymore,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Marine Air Control Group 38, said during a webcast Monday hosted by C4ISRNET, adding that this also includes the cloud.

In the past, U.S. troops were used to constant connectivity to higher headquarters or to pass data back and forth. Now, they will have to operate somewhat disconnected at times, but these new technologies are providing more bandwidth in those scenarios.

“pLEO is a game changer … That high amount of bandwidth and that low latency really changes what’s possible on modern networks,” Quinter told DefenseScoop in an Oct. 7 interview. “Because the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, you have significantly less latency than you typically would. What that means is it makes certain things possible that wouldn’t [otherwise] be possible.”

These constellations provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes. Now, troops can have up to 200 megabytes or more depending on how much officials are willing to spend, allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.

Those constellations are also more resilient given there are more smaller satellites in orbit as opposed to a lower number of exquisite, geosynchronous orbit satellite communications architectures.

“Some of our senior leaders used to refer to those [military satellite constellations] as big, juicy targets for anti-satellite ballistic missiles. With the proliferation of these smaller, flat sats in lower orbit, orders of magnitude — four, five, six — and there’s plans for there to be 10-12,000 of these satellites in lower orbit, there’s inherent survivability in that constellation, just from the sheer numbers,” Quinter said in the webcast.

Those connections, however, are easier to jam, and officials have always been careful to warn that their access must factor into what the military describes as a PACE plan — or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency — depending on the operation.

But the enhanced connectivity those constellations provide will allow forces to operate more dispersed and disconnected on the battlefield, a key tenet as observations from current conflicts indicate static units will be much more vulnerable.

“Once you have that kind of bandwidth, you don’t need to be persistently connected. You could establish a hybrid cloud network,” Quinter said.

Quinter served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix. He noted that during that process, officials used to say the critical requirement to enable that concept is cloud.

Key to realizing that goal is the DOD’s enterprise cloud contract vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders. Officials in the past have indicated how important this vehicle is to the CJADC2 concept and enabling connectivity and interoperability of forces across the globe.

“We are working with companies … through their cloud environment and trying to establish that hybrid cloud architecture at the edge of the network, which could persist without a connection over pLEO. You could turn that satellite connection on and off as necessary to be more survivable,” Quinter said.

He noted that as long as units have enough processing power and storage at the edge, they don’t need to be constantly connected. They just need to be able to process the information in the field.

“I say ‘hybrid cloud’ because it needs to be both private and public, like we need to be taking advantage of the prime contractors that are on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract,” he said. “Those will enable us to leverage [a] big data center when we are connected to the enterprise. But we also need to have the hardware at the edge of our network that can handle cloud, hybrid cloud at the edge.”

Quinter noted that the entire DOD is looking at how to get forces to operate more persistently disconnected. He likened a future scenario to submarines that are usually disconnected, but they surface when they need to, download the necessary data and dive back down to resume their patrols.

“We learned that as communicators, that we need to have a PACE plan. You hear other folks from other communities talking a lot more about that now, but I would say that with the technology that’s available right now, you could essentially operate in a no probability to detect, no probability of intercept environment, because hybrid cloud will enable you to do many, many things on the edge of a network that you typically, at least historically, have not been able to do,” Quinter said.

This notion will require a paradigm shift and change in thinking for many service members that have been used to being constantly connected.

“One thing that I have noticed over the last two years in particular, [is] that we have a lot of teaching and educating that we need to do across the force when it comes to cloud,” he said. “I think there’s not enough people that understand how that technology works in particular, which puts us at a disadvantage, because as we’re designing these circuits to install, operate, maintain them in the network in a combat environment, we need to know what’s in the realm possible. I think cloud is not something with that we’re teaching in the schoolhouse yet, but we’re getting there.”

There is a bit of a misconception among many, Quinter added, given cloud is associated with large data centers.

“When people think about cloud, they think about data centers, like back in [the continental U.S.]. In their mind, I think it’s a natural default for most people to think, ‘Well, if I’m not connected to the data center, then how am I using the cloud?’” he said. “That’s what I meant by the level of education that’s required, even across the comm community, for people to understand what is and is not possible when it comes to cloud.”

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The program is a key element of the DOD’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of operations.

JWCC replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. In December 2022, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program and are competing for task orders.

The contract vehicle provides the department “the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers,” defense officials noted in an innovation fact sheet distributed on Wednesday.

To date, the Pentagon has executed more than $969 million on JWCC and “has 75 other packages in the process for award,” per the fact sheet.

That dollar value is about 50 percent higher than it was just a few months ago. In May at the DefenseTalks conference presented by DefenseScoop, David McKeown, DOD’s deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and senior information security officer, said the department had given 84 task orders at that point, totaling $628 million.

The fact sheet released Wednesday didn’t provide a breakdown of how many task orders each of the vendors has won.

Pentagon officials have been encouraging DOD components to embrace the contract vehicle.

“We had a memo put out that said all of the services [and] agencies need to rationalize their contracts for consuming cloud and move to JWCC at first opportunity,” McKeown noted.

Jeff Marshall, acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center, said earlier this week that the initiative is “doing well.”

“It’s a contract vehicle that basically allows mission partners to come to us and be able to get into the cloud without having to do a lot of their own heavy lift to get that set up,” he said during an event Tuesday hosted by Defense One.

“The JWCC allows them to basically get that acquisition vehicle fairly quickly, and then they have something in their hands to work with,” Marshall added. “When I came in, what I saw is that is the push that DISA and DOD was taking everyone into the direction of. And it makes sense. It’s a cloud-first mentality. It definitely is where we should go for elasticity, for scalability and for metering systems, so that people can basically get their workloads and get them where they need them and do them correctly in a cloud environment without having to deal with the infrastructure and those costs and the things that are not part of their core.”

However, DISA is also looking to retool its Stratus cloud offering so that mission partners have better options when it makes more sense for them to use a private cloud instead of a public cloud, he noted.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials are looking ahead to the next phase of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, dubbed JWCC 2.0.

Before retiring recently, then DOD Chief Information Officer John Sherman directed the CIO’s team to conduct a review of the entire effort. 

“While I’m a huge fan of it, I know it’s not perfect. Because … we’re kind of figuring out how to walk and chew gum in a multi-vendor environment,” Sherman said during an exit interview in June with DefenseScoop. “What can we do better for JWCC 2.0? Are there things we can put into place to make [software-as-a-service] offerings easier to manage?”

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Known as Project Enigma, the digital environment aims to allow Space Systems Command (SSC) to collaborate with different stakeholders in a multi-enclave, cloud-based shared network. The service awarded GDIT an $18 million other transaction authority agreement in 2023 to develop the prototype digital infrastructure, and the company recently received an extension contract to add more capabilities to the platform, according to Travis Dawson, GDIT’s senior director for Project Enigma.

“This resulting digital services ecosystem will further drive resilient, secure information-sharing to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Dawson said in an interview with DefenseScoop.

GDIT hosted around 200 government stakeholders for a demonstration of Project Enigma earlier this month at Los Angeles Air Force Base, where the company showcased some of the digital environment’s capabilities, including digital engineering tools, a software factory with DevSecOps pipelines, an IT service management desk and more.

“Working in a government setting and having the ability to sit at one device and do classified and unclassified work on the same device is monumental,” Dawson said. “Rather than having to leave your device and go to a secure facility, login with some classified credentials, etc., you can do that from one device.”

During the event, the company also demonstrated an initial operating capability of Project Enigma’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSFC) offering. Approved by the National Security Agency, CSFC allows users to work on classified networks either in-office on a desktop version known as a “trusted thin client” or remotely on a laptop, Dawson said.

“We’re rolling out both of those … right now, putting the trusted clients on the desk within Space Systems Command in L.A.,” he said. “Those provide the ability to securely communicate in … multiple independent levels of security simultaneously from a single device, and it ultimately could be from a remote device.”

The company is currently focused on enabling work in secret-level classified environments. There is some appetite within the U.S. government to add top secret and special access programs (SAP), but the company has yet to begin work on those, Dawson said.

Moving forward on its extended contract, GDIT is currently working on expanding access to Project Enigma beyond those within SSC and incorporating connections with industry partners, he noted.

GDIT also plans to add more mission partners and more commercial cloud service providers to the platform, creating a classified multi-cloud environment for collaboration, he said. While Dawson couldn’t name which cloud service providers would be integrated, he noted that they are companies approved by the Defense Department’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract vehicle. Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Google compete for task orders under the JWCC program.

The addition of commercial cloud is part of a larger GDIT effort known as digital accelerators, Dawson said. The company offers a portfolio of tailored solutions from the commercial sector — from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity — that can be brought into different platforms.

“These are integrated commercial technologies. They have been cyber hardened, and they’re customizable,” Dawson explained. “The customers can go ahead and customize them to their needs and their requirements, and they don’t have to be locked into any type of technology.”

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JWCC is the Pentagon’s high-priority enterprise cloud effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the $9 billion JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders.

The initiative is a key element of the department’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to enable better and faster decision-making and more effective and efficient operations.

“We are trying to continue on our journey for cloud. We awarded the JWCC contract. We had a memo put out that said all of the services [and] agencies need to rationalize their contracts for consuming cloud and move to JWCC at first opportunity. So that’s been going well. We’ve had 84 [task order] awards to date, and totaling $628 million,” David McKeown, DOD’s deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and senior information security officer, said Wednesday at DefenseTalks, presented by DefenseScoop.

McKeown did not provide a breakdown of the task order awards by company.

“We’re also working a lot on edge computing. We’ve got a couple of joint operational edge nodes in [Indo-Pacific Command] that we’re doing a lot of tests on. And then of course, DISA has got their own on prem cloud that they offer for the DOD called Stratus. So lots of cloud work there [that’s] continuing to evolve and mature. And it’s very important for the department,” he added.

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Sharon Woods, who was serving as director of the J9 Hosting and Compute Center at DISA, was appointed to take the helm of the J6 directorate, according to an announcement on LinkedIn.

She stepped into her new role on Monday.

“We deliver networking and endpoint solutions at all classification levels to the Department of Defense. This is a crucial mission, connecting the Department’s globally dispersed workforce, from the Pentagon to the edge, with unified communications. Incorporating my experience with cloud technology, I hope to drive modernization and propel J6 forward as the premier communications provider to the Department,” Woods said in a post.

Woods has served in key roles as DISA, a combat support agency, has undergone transformation in recent years. She was executive director of the Cloud Computing Program Office, which in 2021 merged with other DISA entities to create the Hosting and Compute Center. Woods then became director of the new organization.

The merger “enabled DISA to emerge as a hybrid cloud solutions provider. Stratus, Vulcan, JWCC, and upcoming DoD Olympus are just a few of the capabilities that J9 Hosting and Compute is delivering to the Department,” she said.

JWCC, or Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, is the Pentagon’s most high-profile enterprise cloud effort. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the program in December 2022 and will each compete for task orders. The $9 billion initiative replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program.

Prior to joining DISA, Woods served as general counsel for the Defense Digital Service for more than three years. Before that, she held several roles in the Department of the Navy’s Office of General Counsel, including as associate counsel for the program executive office for enterprise information systems, general counsel for the DOD Healthcare Management System Modernization program and associate counsel for Naval Enterprise Networks, according to her LinkedIn bio.

Jeff Marshall, who served under Woods as DISA’s vice director of the J9 Hosting and Compute Center, is now the acting director of that organization.

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The company on Monday announced that three of its classified, air-gapped cloud regions received accreditation from the Department of Defense to handle workloads at the secret level — what the department refers to as Impact Level 6 (IL-6).

The achievement comes after Oracle last August also earned a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information accreditation from the intelligence community. With both that and the latest secret-level cloud authorization, Oracle is approved to handle government information at any classification level in the cloud.

“America’s warfighters must have the world’s preeminent technology and our taxpayers insist that technology is delivered at competitive costs. Oracle is bringing both to the Department of Defense’s Secret networks,” Rand Waldron, vice president of Oracle, said in a statement. “Technology no longer sits outside the mission; technology is a part of the mission. In austere locations with limited communication, and in massive secure data centers, Oracle is bringing our best capabilities to serve the men and women that defend the U.S. and our Allies.”

While the news comes most to the benefit of the DOD, which is expanding its use of cloud in the classified space and at the edge through its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, it ultimately puts Oracle on a level playing field with its top competitors in the federal cloud space — Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which have all earned secret and top secret accreditations ahead of Oracle. Google announced its accreditation at the secret and top-secret levels just two weeks earlier.

Notably, it is those companies that Oracle is vying against for DOD task orders under its $9 billion JWCC cloud contract. Those companies also hold spots, with IBM, on the intelligence community’s multibillion-dollar Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, which requires work at the secret and top-secret levels as well.

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More than 47 task orders were awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency, which runs the contract, and over 50 more are in the pipeline presently, Sherman told the House Armed Services Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee Friday.

The task orders are part of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion enterprise cloud effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and will each compete for task orders.

That effort is critical to enabling the U.S. military’s top priority of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster.

“Following our award of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract in December 2022, DoD Components now have access to commercial cloud computing at all three security classifications, from the headquarters to the tactical edge, which is critical to enabling Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) and other important efforts, such as modern software development and artificial intelligence,” Sherman and DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner told the subcommittee in written testimony. “In the first year of execution, the team was focused on helping Mission Partners through the acquisition process and adopt JWCC … We published guidance for the use of JWCC and cloud rationalization to streamline cloud contracting and reduce contract sprawl across the Department.”

For years, the Pentagon has articulated the critical need for enterprise cloud capabilities that can provide data and information flow at the tactical edge for decision makers and military units.

“The current crisis in Ukraine and CJADC2 experiments demonstrate the need for rapid extension of enhanced edge computing capabilities globally to reduce network latency, enable advanced data processing such as AI, and improve operational resilience,” Sherman and Skinner wrote. “The DoD CIO, [Chief Digital and AI Officer], and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security are engaged with the Combatant Commands (CCMD), the MILDEPs, and forward deployed partners to deliver the latest cloud computing and communications technologies to meet these requirements.”

Skinner also told the committee the department has deployed an initial overseas cloud supporting Indo-Pacific Command missions.

“In the last 12 months, the DoD CIO, in partnership with DISA, successfully deployed the initial [outside the continental United States] commercial cloud capability in support of INDOPACOM missions. This OCONUS cloud capability will establish the OCONUS portion of the global, resilient, and secure information environment that supports the National Defense Strategy’s (NDS) top priorities. Specifically, the OCONUS cloud enables warfighting and mission command, resulting in improved agility, greater lethality, and improved decision-making at all levels,” the written testimony stated.

Moreover, DISA has expanded the Stratus Private Cloud outside the continental U.S. to enable hybrid cloud deployments overseas.

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Broadly, multi-cloud computing models involve two or more public cloud options, and hybrid cloud computing refers to environments with a mix of private (or enterprise-hosted) and public cloud services.

Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are competing for task orders via the Defense Department’s enterprise cloud initiative, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). The intelligence community’s multi-cloud construct, Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), is similar to JWCC and incorporates the same vendors, as well as IBM.

Awarded in 2020, C2E is a 15-year contract.

At this point, though, U.S. intel organizations “don’t have a multi-cloud/hybrid architecture at the IC level that would allow us to freely be able to exchange information with one another — and we don’t have a catalog … for [sharing] datasets,” Fred Ingham said last week during a panel at the annual GEOINT Symposium. 

Ingham is a CIA employee who’s currently on detail as the deputy chief information officer at the National Reconnaissance Office.

“In the old days, if I were to create a system that needed to take data from a spaceborne asset and write it very quickly to memory process that data, do analysis on that data, eventually come up with some intelligence and perhaps store it in a repository — what I might build is I might create a very high-speed network” and a storage area network, he said. He added that he’d also buy “purpose-built servers” and a database for processing, among other assets.

The government would approve that system for storing information only after “I knew precisely how all of those bits and pieces work together,” Ingham explained.

“Now, let’s fast forward into a multi-cloud construct” with that same system — “completely contrived,” he said — offering a hypothetical to demonstrate current challenges. 

“So we’re downloading the same bits and I’m going to choose to put that into Google, because I like their multicast capability, so we’re going to write those bits very quickly into Google. And then I’m going to process them. And let’s just say I’ve got my processing already in AWS, I’ve got heavy GPUs there. So, I want to process that in AWS. And I happen to like Microsoft’s [machine learning] algorithms, so I’m going to do the analysis there, inside of Azure. And this intelligence that I accrue, I’m going to go store this in an Oracle database. I didn’t leave out IBM, it’s just IBM is on the high side. Alright, so I want to do that — [but] I can’t do it,” Ingham said. 

He spotlighted reasons why officials can’t yet make this move-across-a-multi-cloud vision a reality.

“Number one, [the IC] acquired five cloud vendors, and we didn’t have a strategy or an architecture about how all of those things would fit together and work with one another,” Ingham said. 

The intel community does not currently have an overarching cloud governance model. 

Ingham noted at the conference he spoke to a representative from IBM, who told him about a commercial “cloud exchange, where each of those cloud providers are sitting in that same data center, and therefore they have the same type of networking capabilities — and so transport between the clouds are equal.”

“We don’t have that in the IC today,” he pointed out.

He highlighted a present lack of capacity to deterministically understand the performance of each cloud, onboarding tools, operational support, identity management, how data moves and comprehensive situational awareness across the cloud service providers, among other issues. 

“What I like to think about is frictionless computing, that’s not frictionless — and until we solve those issues, I don’t see us being able to use the multi-cloud in the manner that I just described,” Ingham said. 

On the panel, leaders from other intelligence agencies also reflected on the benefits and obstacles of their unfolding, government cloud deployments.

“The government has to do a better job in defining requirements — functional requirements — and more importantly, as you go towards a potential conflict with China, the operational requirements, or the operational scenarios in which you’re expected to run and deliver solutions [via the cloud]. I think we in the government have not done an appropriate job of that to our IT solution providers,” the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Chief Information Officer E.P. Mathew said.

Meanwhile, the National Security Agency is “already very far along on its multi-cloud journey,” according to NSA’s Deputy Chief Information Officer Jennifer Kron. Officials there “truly believe in finding the right computing solution for each mission” and purpose, she said, and so they are leveraging services from multiple providers.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency started moving “everything” to the cloud in 2015. But by 2016, officials “very quickly found out” that moving all the workloads “wasn’t really the smart thing to do,” NGA’s Director for Chief Information Officer and IT Services Mark Chatelain said. Now, the agency is using the C2E contract to diversify its cloud holdings, he noted, with aims to “figure out how to smartly use the multi-cloud” over the next few years.

Recently, NGA has been requesting that industry provide “something like a single-pane-of-glass view of a multi-cloud” ecosystem, Chatelain said — “so, you don’t have to go to Google window or an Oracle window, you basically have a single-pane-of-glass window that you can manage all of the clouds.”

NGA also wants more affordable applications to move data and capabilities, as well as direct connections between the clouds to expedite information transfer.

“Imagery, as you know, consumes a huge amount of data. NGA brings in about 15 terabytes per day of imagery into their facilities, today. And that’s predicted to grow probably about 1,000% in the next coming six or seven years. So we’ve got to have the connectivity between the clouds to be able to share that information,” Chatelain noted.

He and other officials suggested that cloud providers should recommend an architecture and appropriate path forward. They were hopeful that could soon be in the pipeline.

“I had the opportunity to be with all of the cloud vendors yesterday and today — and without exception, every one of them is very much in favor of exactly that. They know they bring something to the fight that nobody else does, and they know that their competitors bring something to the fight that they can’t bring,” Chatelain said.

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