Understanding JWCC
In 2013, AWS was awarded the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract, which was a single-award contract from the CIA for AWS to build and deliver cloud computing services at the Unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret levels to the 17 US Intelligence Agencies. This was ground-breaking at the time, marking the government’s desire to contract directly with a commercial technology company at scale, therefore accelerating cloud adoption.
The US Defense Department wanted to follow suit, so it constructed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which was a single-award, winner-takes-all contract to provide commercial cloud services to Defense. By this time, Oracle, Google, and especially Microsoft Azure had made significant strides in providing cloud capabilities that competed with AWS.
The competition to win this contract was fierce. In 2019, it was announced that Microsoft had won. AWS protested, and after lawyers spent months sorting things out, the government opted to cancel the procurement and proceed with a multi-cloud strategy. This became the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which was awarded in 2022 and is managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for all of Defense.
JWCC is a multi-award contract vehicle, meaning that Defense customers create their stated cloud requirements, and the prime contract holders—AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle—then compete for task order awards to deliver their commercial cloud services. The intent of establishing a single cloud contract vehicle managed by DISA was to achieve greater cloud cost savings while speeding up the overall adoption of cloud across all of Defense.
So what does this mean on the ground, where execution matters, for new companies trying to deliver in Defense?
First, Defense customers are generally behind Commercial enterprises in cloud adoption. With the data they are generating and an increased desire for AI-enabled applications, their compute and storage capacities may be limited.
As a new company in Defense, if your application requires a significant amount of compute and storage, you must ask yourself: will your Defense customer have to leverage the JWCC contract first before having the capacity to use your technology? If yes, then your success and timelines may be tied to the timelines and success of your preferred CSP winning the contract through DISA’s procurement process (see above!).
New players must look at the end-to-end procurement and process requirements their customers will have to follow for their application to be up, running, and providing mission value at scale. In some cases, this may alter how you want to engineer your product for Defense so that it can also run on premises or at the edge. Assuming your customer can obtain compute and storage resources easily is not a safe assumption.
Understanding contracts like JWCC, their context in providing cloud services at scale, and how they affect new technologies in the Defense sector, can make a big difference in how entrepreneurs and inventors make key decisions for their business to succeed. It’s why my company was founded; to monitor how all of the dots connect so companies can execute tactically in ways that promote strategic, long-term success.
