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WASHINGTON All four vendors who won a spot on the Pentagons Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, worth up to $8 billion, have been awarded the first batch of task orders under the effort, a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

According to the spokesperson, each of the vendors Amazon Web Services, Google, Oracle and Microsoft received equal task orders, with the value of each task order being $3.8 million to essentially do some early poking and prodding about what JWCC could be capable of.

The first task orders awarded under the JWCC contract allows the JWCC Program Management Office to test cloud service offerings in a sandbox environment, validating several JWCC requirements through real world cloud consumption (e.g., proof of concepts, verification of policy-based controls), the spokesperson said.

The task order was awarded on March 24, and the period of performance includes a one-year base period and two one-year option periods.

DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner mentioned the award briefly today during the Senate Armed Services Committees subcommittee on cybersecurity hearing.

We just awarded the first task order last week and many others are working through the process, Skinner said.

Last December, DoD awarded the four vendors a spot on the multi-cloud follow up effort to the infamous single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract which was scrapped in 2021. The new multi-vendor effort is meant to provide the department with an enterprise-wide cloud capability that spans all classification levels.

DoD is also set to release secret-level offerings of JWCC in a few weeks and top secret-level offerings in the summer, Sharon Woods, director of DISAs Hosting and Compute Center, said March 14.

Thats a capability we really dont have in the department an enterprise top secret cloud environment, Woods said. You know, the intelligence community does, but the departmentis not able to leverage that contract and so that is one of those capability gaps that JWCC is meeting.

She added that DoD is looking at whether the JWCC offerings can fuel individual cloud efforts within the military services. Although each service has its own cloud-focused effort, the Pentagon wants JWCC to be an option and envisions it being the foundation for Joint All Domain Command and Control, DoDs effort to connect sensors to shooters across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace domains.

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Pentagon awards first set of JWCC task orders to all 4 vendors - Breaking Defense