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January 16, 2020 By cs

Amazon will ask judge to halt work on DoD’s JEDI contract

With less than a month to go before the Pentagon and Microsoft get to work on building the military’s new Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud, Amazon Web Services said Monday that it would ask a court to temporarily block any meaningful work under the controversial contract.

AWS gave notice of its plans as part of a status update its attorneys and the Justice Department filed jointly with the Court of Federal Claims. As part of the company’s bid protest lawsuit, its lawyers have previously said they were considering asking the court for a preliminary injunction, but the latest filing is the first concrete indication of their plans.

DoD has already said it intends to issue Microsoft the first “substantive” task order to begin building the unclassified portions of JEDI by Feb. 11. Because AWS wants to stop the work before then, and because DoD considers the project urgent to national security, lawyers for all three parties have already agreed on an expedited schedule for the court to consider either a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order.

Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith would still need to agree to that schedule, but under the proposal, AWS plans to file its formal request to block work on JEDI by Jan. 24. DoD and Amazon would then have a little more than a week to respond with their filings asking the judge to deny it, and the court would issue a final ruling by Feb. 11, the day DoD plans to issue the first task order.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/01/amazon-will-ask-judge-to-halt-work-on-dods-jedi-contract/

January 10, 2020 By cs

After 2 years, JEDI is finally underway

The second year of competition for the Pentagon’s controversial cloud contract was as dramatic as the first.

The Pentagon’s high-profile Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract is right back where it was one year ago: tied up in litigation.

The circumstances have changed in the past calendar year, with Microsoft winning JEDI in October and former favorite to win the contract, Amazon Web Services, protesting the decision in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

At best, the Defense Department and Microsoft cannot begin work until at least mid-February, putting the Pentagon more than a year behind its initial schedule for JEDI. An internal JEDI strategy document released in November 2017 sought a JEDI award in fourth quarter of 2018 and migrations to the cloud platform by the beginning of 2019.

And yet, what unfolded in 2019 was high drama in the federal contracting world over an improbably high-profile government contract.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-years-jedi-finally-underway/162005/

January 8, 2020 By cs

Time to end Oracle’s long legal fight against JEDI cloud contract, government says

Government attorneys are telling a federal appeals court that it should rule against Oracle in its long-running legal challenge to the Pentagon’s JEDI Cloud contract — partly because some of Oracle’s legal claims are now beside the point.

Oracle is seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that found the Defense Department was on solid legal footing when it structured the multibillion dollar cloud contract. The company claims the Court of Federal Claims made “grave” errors in its ruling, including by brushing aside what Oracle alleges were serious conflicts of interest involving DoD employees and Amazon Web Services.

But in a response the government filed with the appellate court on Dec. 26, attorneys said any alleged improprieties surrounding AWS are now moot because of the Pentagon’s surprise decision in October to pick Microsoft, not Amazon, as the winner of the JEDI contract.

“Indeed, Oracle requested that AWS be eliminated from the JEDI competition, and DoD has effectively granted this relief, albeit for different reasons, by the award to Microsoft,” DoD and Justice Department attorneys wrote in their brief to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. “Accordingly, the court could not presently grant relief that would redress the alleged errors.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/01/time-to-end-oracles-long-legal-fight-against-jedi-cloud-contract-government-says/

May 6, 2019 By AMK

Despite the ‘potential ethical violations,’ JEDI contract moves forward

In the wake of an ethics investigation, Pentagon officials have selected two cloud service providers to move forward as potential candidates in the Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative cloud services contract.

The selection of those providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, came after an Oracle lawsuit challenging the legality of the JEDI contract process was put on hold in February to allow DoD to investigate previously unknown information about conflicts of interest.

“The department’s investigation has determined that there is no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process,” DoD spokesperson Elissa Smith in a statement.

“However, the investigation also uncovered potential ethical violations, which have been further referred to DoD [inspector general]. There are two different components of the investigation. First, DoD investigated potential conflicts of interest as they relate to the acquisition process. This portion of the investigation determined that there are no conflicts of interest that affected the integrity of the acquisition process. However, there may be potential ethical violations, which have been referred to DoD IG for further investigation.”

Keep reading article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2019/04/11/despite-the-potential-ethical-violations-jedi-moves-forward/

May 2, 2019 By AMK

CIA considering cloud contract worth ‘tens of billions’

After six years in a classified commercial cloud built by Amazon Web Services, the CIA wants more commercial cloud capabilities from potentially multiple companies.

The agency is in the early stages of planning a contract for commercial cloud computing services that will be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents presented to select tech companies by the CIA in late March and obtained by Nextgov.

Dubbed the Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, the two-phase initiative will “expand and enhance” the commercial cloud capabilities it first contracted for with Amazon Web Services in 2013.

That contract, called C2S and valued at up to $600 million over 10 years, provided commercial cloud capabilities such as data storage, computing and analytics to the CIA and its 16 sister agencies within the intelligence community.

“Since that time, cloud computing has proven transformational for the IC–increasing the speed at which new applications can be developed to support mission and improving the functionality and security of those applications,” the CIA contracting documents state.

Whereas C2S has been managed by a single company, the CIA expects to “acquire foundational cloud services” from multiple vendors in phase one of C2E, which is good news for companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google and others expected to compete for the contract.

Keep reading article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/04/cia-considering-cloud-contract-worth-tens-billions/156222

With less than a month to go before the Pentagon and Microsoft get to work on building the military’s new Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud, Amazon Web Services said Monday that it would ask a court to temporarily block any meaningful work under the controversial contract.

The second year of competition for the Pentagon’s controversial cloud contract was as dramatic as the first.

Government attorneys are telling a federal appeals court that it should rule against Oracle in its long-running legal challenge to the Pentagon’s JEDI Cloud contract — partly because some of Oracle’s legal claims are now beside the point.

In the wake of an ethics investigation, Pentagon officials have selected two cloud service providers to move forward as potential candidates in the Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative cloud services contract.

After six years in a classified commercial cloud built by Amazon Web Services, the CIA wants more commercial cloud capabilities from potentially multiple companies.

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