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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/

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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

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Watchdog dings Public Buildings Service for bumpy cloud shift

Efforts by the General Services Administration to protect data gathered by its building lease support services providers got tangled in internal contracting rules, according to an inspector general report.

In 2017, data on building rental rates and federal tenants collected by GSA lease support brokers for GSA’s Public Building Services was transferred to the agency’s virtual desktop interface accounts that are used with GSA Google accounts, the GSA IG said in a recent report.

GSA IT, which is information security manager for the lease support brokers, made the move because it saw some of the six contractors struggling with security requirements. Contractor support services include market surveys, site visits, document preparation and lease negotiations. The shifts were made after the contracts were awarded.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/articles/2019/03/25/gsa-buildings-cloud-data.aspx

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Watchdog group: DoD’s JEDI cloud is mired in murk

There is immense power in the cloud. It’s a cutesy colloquialism, one that calls to mind spring afternoons or fantastical floating fiefdoms, but it is also one of the great modern misnomers.

All data stored in the cloud is really housed in some else’s computer.

That’s one reason the Pentagon has been so reluctant to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud.

The trade-offs in storing information outside the facilities it’s directly used in is likely fine for most casual or business cases, but it gets a little scary when it comes to the raw data of national security. Which is why the Pentagon is looking to entrust its data to a dedicated, defended cloud, contracted under the unsubtle term Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. On March 13, nonpartisan coalition Open the Government released a report on Amazon and government secrecy, calling into question the contract and the process by which it will be awarded.

Like everything involving JEDI, there’s an extensive backstory. The cloud is essentially infrastructure, storage space that people and businesses pay for that allows them to access the same files from the internet, wherever they may be. That makes it somewhat different than traditional IT contracts, since it’s not exactly software and it’s not exactly hardware and, once adopted, it becomes the kind of thing future software and hardware depends on. That makes the contract itself, designed for a single supplier and an indefinite duration, worth $10 billion from the start.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/2019/03/22/pentagon-cloud-mired-in-opacity-says-transparency-group

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Army bets big on service contracts to fix aging IT

The Army’s information technology is too old, and modernization is too slow.

So the service needs a “fundamentally different” strategy that relies heavily on the private sector, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford said the Army has to start relying on contractors to own and operate IT on the Army’s behalf — what he calls “enterprise IT as a service” — and start moving on-base IT to Defense Department clouds.

“Around 70 percent overall of that [IT] infrastructure — in the case of voice, it’s probably as high as 90 percent — is at or near end of life,” Crawford told the Association of the US Army.  “[It] would take beyond the year 2030 — if we stayed on the current path — to modernize. We ran into one brick wall after another [asking], ‘how do we get speed,’” Crawford continued. So, about six months ago, he and Lt. Gen. Steve Fogarty, head of Army Cyber Command, realized “we needed to do something fundamentally different.”

This effort’s urgent because the aging IT on Army bases can’t protect data from high-end hackers, provide the bandwidth for new augmented-reality training systems or support combat units waging high-intensity warfare against great powers (i.e., Russia and China), Crawford said. “This reform and modernization initiative,” he said, “is less about saving money than it is about increasing operational effectiveness throughout the force.”

Keep reading this article at: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/army-bets-big-on-service-contracts-to-fix-aging-it/

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