The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract will create a cloud like no other, private or public. The Department of Defense (DoD) envisions a “worldwide, highly available, exponentially elastic, secure, resilient cloud computing and storage environment that seamlessly extends from the homefront to the tactical edge.” JEDI will be DoD’s first war cloud. Hence, as many Pentagon officials have argued, the single-award contract is needed to avoid being limited by the slow pace of a multiple-award contract followed by the requirement to compete each task order. The situation would be even more difficult to manage if among the winners of an award were companies that were not able to meet the Impact Level 6 security standard. Opponents of the current JEDI acquisition strategy, which is based on a single award and high-security requirement, would force DoD to go backward regarding exploiting cloud computing’s potential. They are at best misguided or, at worst, self-serving. I have written more about this here.
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