The “Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Components, and Defense Agencies and Field Activities (DAFAs) will use the [Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability] contract vehicle for all available offerings to procure future enterprise cloud computing capabilities and services,” states a memo from the DOD CIO dated July 31, 2023, but released publicly Aug. 2. “All cloud capabilities and services currently under contract in OSD Components and DAFAs will transition to the JWCC vehicle upon expiration of their current period of performance. OSD Components and DAFAs may utilize on-premises cloud offerings (e.g., Stratus), where applicable.”

JWCC, awarded in December, is the DOD’s highly anticipated $9 billion enterprise cloud effort that replaced the maligned Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the contract and will each compete for task orders. The contract vehicle was developed to streamline cloud buying for DOD and its components at all classification levels.

“The JWCC contract vehicle provides the DoD an unprecedented ability to directly acquire commercial capabilities and services at three classification levels (Unclassified, Secret, Top Secret, and from strategic and operational headquarters to the tactical edge,” the memo states. “The JWCC is not a cloud management or hosting environment, but rather a key vehicle in the Department’s technology arsenal for the acquisition of services for current and future DoD Component managed and controlled cloud environments.”

Between the period JEDI was canceled and JWCC was in source selection, many of the services were charting their own cloud course, not necessarily waiting for JWCC to be awarded.

Now, however, the DOD wants components to turn to this vehicle, particularly at higher classification levels and for cloud services leveraged overseas.

“[A]ll DoD Components, to include Military Departments (MILDEPs) and Combatant Commands (CCMDs), will leverage the JWCC contract vehicle for all available offerings for any new cloud computing capabilities and services at the Secret (Impact Level 6) or Top Secret, including all tactical edge and Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS) cloud computing capabilities and services,” the memo states.

The memo was sure to note that services and components can still rely on other methods to procure capabilities that were not listed, such as Infrastructure as a Service. Moreover, the memo is not “mandating” JWCC for all cloud capabilities, but rather, encouraging its use for needs “especially as trends from OSD Component and DAFA-use provide additional data points in the coming year on price competitiveness and mission efficacy.”

DOD CIO John Sherman has said recently that he wants to see an acceleration of JWCC capabilities getting into the field.

“I want to keep moving even more so than we are on JWCC … I am so excited about what JWCC brings from [outside the continental U.S.] and the edge,” Sherman said in May. “Conflict with China is neither inevitable nor desirable and I want to emphasize that. [But] because we will look at what our forces might have to do inside a second island chain in the western Pacific as a Marine littoral regiment and that stand-in force … they [have] got to be able to have capabilities, compute, transport and so on, that works and is going to be there for them. That’s what JWCC is going to help bring to them.”

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The Enterprise Application Migration and Modernization contract (EAMM) will be a roughly $1 billion multi-award, multi-vendor effort that is set to kick off in the third quarter of fiscal 2023, CIO Raj Iyer revealed Tuesday at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army.

“This is going to become the easy button for the Army to actually move to the cloud,” Iyer told reporters during a media roundtable.

Currently, he said, if a command wants to move to the cloud, there is no single contract they can use. They have to shop around, go into multiple contracting centers and find the right vehicle to get them there, which can take months. Plus, by the time they get to that point in the fiscal budget process, they might not have money anymore.

The EAMM vehicle intends to change that, Iyer said, aiming for four weeks to award a task order.

The Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency will operate the procurement, through which it will essentially hold the hands of commands looking for a better mechanism to get to the cloud.

“It’s no longer just telling the commands, ‘Hey you got to go figure it out.’ We’re really holding their hand to help them migrate their applications in the cloud, all the way from architecting it, working through, migrating the data, the contract vehicle and so on,” Iyer said.

Despite the Department of Defense’s forthcoming cloud vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) – which was designed to replace the maligned Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) – Iyer said the Army will need both.

“JWCC will be an avenue for DOD to actually procure, compute and store directly from the cloud service providers like the Amazons and the Googles of the world,” he said. “What EAMM does is [it’s] the vehicle to actually modernize your application, get it to be cloud native and then migrate it to the cloud. You’re going to need both … We need better buying power through consolidation of our requirements.”

Since JWCC isn’t awarded yet, despite leaders saying it is on track for a December award, Iyer said the Army needs something right now.

“We will look at JWCC as a potential opportunity to leverage that. But because it hasn’t been awarded yet, we don’t know what the rates are and what the discounts are,” Iyer said. “But clearly for us in the Army, if there’s another vehicle out there that offers greater discounts, we will absolutely use JWCC.”

Divesting NIPRNet

Iyer also said the Army is planning a divestiture of its unclassified network, the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), by fiscal 2017.

This is due, in part, to the fact that the Defense Information Systems Agency is sunsetting its Joint Regional Security Stacks, which were essentially routers and switches that existed at installations.

Replacing that with more infrastructure at the installation level will be time-consuming and expensive, Iyer said, calling that not a viable path for the Army.  

But additionally, the Army believes as it moves to the cloud, it does not want to be bogged down by additional infrastructure to provide its personnel — including Guard and Reserve — better access to email and services.

“We have built some tremendous complexity into this network and if you look at how the Guard and Reserve struggle to get access to the network today, they got to go to an armory or a reserve center to go and get access because of how we have built a network over the years,” Iyer said. “With all of our applications now moving to the cloud and Army 365 and Google Workspace that we have now also implemented, all of these cloud-based solutions now mean that you no longer need to have access to a physical wired network somewhere to access your data. The intent is to really get to bringing any device that you have to be able to access your data from any network. That includes any Wi-Fi hotspot and especially at armories and reserve centers. We are trying to kill the wired network and moving to Wi-Fi and 5G.”

The Army recently launched a Google Workspace initiative allowing email access to a large portion of personnel that was slated to lose access.

Iyer noted that NIPRNet isn’t completely going away. There will likely still be some mission-critical, sensitive activities that will remain on it. The Army is conducting assessments to see what missions will need it.

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“The short story is we’re not waiting, we haven’t waited, we will continue to not wait for anybody else to come and provide us with capability,” Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger told FedScoop during an interview for the Let’s Talk About IT podcast when asked about the service’s plans for cloud adoption with JWCC awards looming. “We’re moving forward, we’re moving out, we’re continuing to improve” Cloud One, she added.

Knausenberger detailed the robust cloud platform the Air Force has developed in Cloud One, calling it the “world’s largest cloud instantiation for any commercial or government entity,” in terms of internal business. The Air Force contracted with SAIC to help integrate Cloud One and offer cloud services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft to hundreds of thousands of users across the Department of the Air Force and greater DOD.

The $9 billion JWCC procurement is meant to enable a multi-cloud environment across the DOD enterprise to support Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and greater adoption of artificial intelligence, among other things, “at all three security classifications: unclassified, secret and top secret all the way from the continental United States out to the tactical edge,” DOD CIO John Sherman said earlier this year when awards were delayed until December. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have been invited to bid for spots on the acquisition, which was created to replace the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract after it was canceled due to years of ongoing protests and delays.

Knausenberger hopes JWCC is awarded “soon” and that it’s successful, saying that it “may give us some better pricing on compute” at the very least. “And if it does, we’ll still use our Cloud One as a front door and we will purchase that compute via JWCC,” she told FedScoop.

There’s also the chance that JWCC could be awarded and turn out to be a game-changing capability, in which case Knausenberger said she’d reconsider it as more than just an option for cheaper compute.

“If JWCC comes into the market, and those vendors are able to just rapidly and magically almost spin-up fully accredited environments and just really knock it out of the park for migrations, then we can use it for even more things,” she said.

“And if it can solve the problem of global data sovereignty, where I can just leverage any data center anywhere in the world, and we understand that if that data is so encrypted, or if it’s just a shard of data that is maybe sitting somewhere else in the world … could it really cause, you know, a problem with that data being somewhere other than U.S. soil?” Knausenberger added. “If we can solve that problem with JWCC I will be thrilled. If we can solve that problem, multiple levels of classification, and simplify the process of sending data between levels of classification and make that immensely easier than it is today, with many, many, many, many levels of approval before it actually does work pretty well, on the other end of that work — those are all things that I hope for JWCC.”

In the meantime, the Air Force continues to refine its own Cloud One platform. Knausenberger said the service developed what she called “Race to the Cloud,” an effort meant to eliminate manual processes and make the process for users to get to the cloud more automated.

“We haven’t done a good job of making it really, really easily consumable getting to that push-button, spin-up cloud model that you have effectively on the commercial side,” she said.

Knausenberger also plans to pass a “more rigid policy on pushing our cloud offerings into Cloud One and moving our on-prem offerings into Cloud One.”

“Before I send out that guidance, I want to make sure that when people show up and they want to move to the cloud, that it’s not going to take a really long time, that they can show up, that we can assess their workloads very quickly, very efficiently, that we know exactly what the cost will be, that that is transparent, that we have a solid catalog of things for them to look at,” she said.

Listen to Knausenberger’s full comments on Cloud One, JWCC and much more in her interview on the Let’s Talk About IT podcast.

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Originally planned for award in April, the DOD pushed its anticipated timeline for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability to December to allow more time to evaluate vendor proposals.

JWCC will provide what the department and experts say is a much-needed enterprise cloud capability and move beyond the single-vendor model of the ill-fated Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) approach to a multi-vendor approach. In November, DOD invited four vendors to bid on contracts for the JWCC acquisition.

Several experts familiar with defense IT acquisition said the delay in award shouldn’t be an immediate cause for concern, citing the unprecedented nature of a multi-vendor enterprise cloud effort.

“I’m not surprised that something would’ve popped up in some level of review of that strategy or preparing the final proposals,” said Jack Wilmer, CEO of Core4ce and former chief information security officer and deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity at DOD. “There’s so many different things that can pop up that can cause delays. This is a pretty novel acquisition strategy to be able to get to these cloud providers in this manner.”

There’s a lot of technical research and vendor engagement that needs to be done on something like this and the fact that this is a somewhat new endeavor for DOD, it stands to reason there could be a slight delay in awards given how big and complex the undertaking is, said Juliana Vida, chief technical adviser at Splunk and former Navy deputy chief information officer.

“It’s very prudent that they realize: ‘OK, maybe we made a mistake with the projection of the award date and let’s do some more due diligence,’” she said.

Others pointed to the fact that while the DOD isn’t completely starting over from the JEDI acquisition, there isn’t a lot that can be reused from the single-vendor approach to the current multi-vendor approach.

“I’m not going to say they’re starting over, but … the requirements [for JEDI] were derived probably five years ago, which is, generations of technology,” said Rob Carey, president of Cloudera Government Solutions and former DOD deputy chief information officer. “I and my compadres all wondered about that strategy of single award because that strategy basically gives you vendor lock-in and gives you price lock-in with whatever that guy tells you is the price, you’re going to pay for it now.”

Carey noted that the DOD has to work with the military services to get the requirements right so they’ll be on board.

“You have to get the services aboard. You have to get Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps aboard with their specific requirements now that there are four potential vendors,” Carey said.

Awarding the initial JWCC contracts might not be the real challenge, Wilmer contended. Rather, it’ll be ensuring the award of individual task orders.

“The key to me is actually not about getting these original contracts awarded — it’s how do we ensure speed of task orders, being able to get out there and be awarded really quickly afterward. It’s those task orders that are going to be the bulk of the funding that flows through those vehicles,” Wilmer said.

The JWCC contract will have a ceiling of $9 billion with three base years and two option years. It will potentially be four separate contracts with four vendors and there will be competition at the task order level among them based on mission owner requirements, officials have said.

“Having a competition at task order level is the best thing to get pricing for the individual user,” Carey said. “That is really a good strategy. I think that does add a little bit of complexity to the contract, but, in the long run, that is clearly the best way to go.”

In announcing the award delay from April to December, DOD officials were confident in the strategy, approach and that the December timeline won’t slip.

Experts said that another delay might not be cause for concern either, but could be cause for frustration.

“Concern is maybe not the right word. Frustration would be my word,” Carey said. “What I mean by that is remember this contract was intended to be the go-to. You want to go to the cloud, here’s your vehicle. It’s providing a vehicle for the entire Department of Defense to use, and probably other organizations” to use.

Vida said she hopes this doesn’t turn into kicking the can down the road and never getting anything out.

“The mission leaders truly do understand that the time is way past for robust, modern technology to get in the hands of warfighters. I believe that there’s so much positive pressure to move that forward that kicking this contract past December is just probably not going to happen. It’s just not tenable. Nobody benefits from that,” she said.

The longer this contract process drags out before an award, one concerning aspect is the potential to harm industry collaboration.

On any major contract, several companies will partner together to bring forth a more robust offering. But Vida said the longer this goes on, there is the potential for those relationships to go from friendly and collaborative to fractured as organizations will always work in their best interests.

“I hope that the time delay won’t lead to more of the adverse behavior inside industry because again, nobody benefits from that,” she said. “Everyone will benefit when vendors and cloud service providers can work together … It would be good to not see more negative behavior on the industry side.”

The post Despite delay, experts not concerned by DOD’s JWCC cloud contract timeline appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The department recently minted a new software modernization strategy, published in February, aimed at developing an enterprise approach to building software. That strategy replaced the 2018 cloud strategy as well.

The reason the Pentagon didn’t create a standalone cloud strategy is because officials sees the two initiatives as closely linked.

“I don’t think it really makes a lot of sense to separate software modernization from cloud adoption because it would imply that software could be modernized without cloud,” Danielle Metz, deputy chief information officer for information enterprise at the DOD, said Tuesday during a virtual event hosted by Federal News Network.

“Starting in late 2019, we began a very measured strategic shift to software modernization being the primary driver for why we wanted people to go to the cloud, why we wanted to move the department to go to the cloud. It was really the rationale for why the systems needed to go to the cloud.”

Placing cloud adoption at the center of the strategy affirms its importance, she explained.

Moreover, much of what the department is trying to do with software modernization in the digital infrastructure arena involves enterprise services. The biggest effort there is the new Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), which essentially replaced the ill-fated Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure.

JWCC “truly is going to be an enterprise cloud service for the entire department that will provide the full complement of what is currently missing in terms of requirements from unclassified to top secret to tactical edge cloud infrastructure associated services,” Metz said.

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is being managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The main focus will be so-called “Fourth Estate” organizations such as defense agencies and field activities and components in the Pentagon, but the military branches will be able to leverage it as well.

“As those individual cloud contracts term expire, JWCC is available for use. They don’t have to go out and do their own. There is trade space and flexibility to allow for an optimization of enterprise services,” she said.

Colorless money

Pilot efforts underway at the department are helping to shape financial policies going forward for more agile use of DevSecOps, a critical component for software modernization.

Currently, under what is commonly referred to as the “color of money,” the military has certain pots or buckets of funds to use for specifically designated things such as sustainment, procurement, or research and development.

These “colors” have “been hamstringing us in on how we’re going to do DevSecOps,” Metz said.

“There’s a blending of development, operations and security, but our money and how we use our money isn’t affording us to do that,” she said.

“What we have to figure out is from the results of the pilot, how are we going to transform those policies in order for us to be able not to have exceptions and not have oversight? I think it’s that sweet spot balancing the ability to go fast without sacrificing accountability.”

The DOD isn’t ready to share with Congress how well these pilots have worked thus far, Metz said, adding that time is needed to execute them.

Metz said she hopes within the next year the department will be in a better position to make the effort come to fruition.

The post Software modernization and cloud migration go hand in hand for DOD appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Senior IT acquisition officials told participants during a virtual industry day Wednesday they have met with the Cloud One team to kick-off the partnership, focused for now on a handful of pilots to migrate USTRANSCOM’s transportation modeling and simulation tool and both classified and unclassified versions of its Global Transportation Planning systems to the cloud.

Based on the progress made through the remainder of fiscal 2022 with those first pilots, the command will look to move more of its programs of record to Cloud One’s services in fiscal 2023.

The agency planned to move its cloud capabilities, currently hosted in Amazon Web Service’s GovCloud, to the Department of Defense’s now-defunct Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud platform. But with JEDI’s cancellation, USTRANSCOM had to find a new option.

“Like many organizations, we were projected to transition to what was once known as JEDI,” said Scott Borchers, chief of the DevOps & Pipeline Division in USTRANSCOM’s J6 office. “And when the JEDI contract was ultimately canceled, we made a decision to transition to other DoD approved enterprise cloud contracts and services.”

Other options on the table were the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS), which USTRANSCOM does use for collaboration tools, and the Defense Information Systems Agency’s milCloud 2.0, which DISA announced recently would sunset later this year.

Borchers said the plan is to leverage the Air Force’s Cloud One for infrastructure-as-a-service — offering both AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure options — and then use the branch’s Platform One capability as well, “with the intent to speed capability to delivery” for software development.

Jim Lovell, a program executive officer supporting the cloud migration, said in migrating to the Air Force’s existing offerings, it will fast track USTRANSCOM’s adoption of DevSecOps and automated authority to operate (ATO) capabilities, as well as “a lot of the more progressive cloud features that you would expect from a world-class cloud hosting environment.”

“Today we have two or three programs that deliver [software] in three weeks sprints,” Lovell said. “We like that. Our functional community really, really likes that. But we can’t seem to get there with all of our programs, and so that seems to be about a good pace for us where we hope to get there with all of our programs in a more standardized way with the migration to Cloud One.”

At this point, Lovell said, “all indications are we’ll be done with the first three [pilots] in this fiscal year.” And over the next “30 to 45 days,” the command will be finalizing contract actions to make the move.

“We’re well underway,” he said.

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