US Air Force Moving Ahead With Its Own Cloud Platform, Not Waiting for DOD

The US Air Force is moving ahead with its cloud plans rather than waiting on the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.

JWCC is the successor to the doomed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract that was initially awarded to Microsoft. AWS challenged the award and kept it tied up in court for so long that the DOD ultimately abandoned it in favor of the multi-vendor JWCC. The DOD is currently seeking bids from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The Air Force has decided it doesn’t want to wait for the DOD and risk another delay. The military branch is instead moving forward with its own Cloud One endeavor.

“The short story is we’re not waiting, we haven’t waited, we will continue to not wait for anybody else to come and provide us with capability,” Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger told FedScoop. “We’re moving forward, we’re moving out, we’re continuing to improve” Cloud One, she added.

Knausenberger went on to call Cloud One the “world’s largest cloud instantiation for any commercial or government entity.”

The Air Force tapped SAIC to implement its own multicloud approach, using AWS, Google, and Microsoft’s cloud platforms. While the DOD is continuing to pursue the $9 billion JWCC contract, Knausenberger doesn’t see a conflict with Cloud One. In fact, if JWCC becomes a reality, she believes it may offer “better pricing on compute” and ultimately complement Cloud One.

“And if it does, we’ll still use our Cloud One as a front door and we will purchase that compute via JWCC,” she added.