The Government Accountability Office decided to sustain Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) protest of a potential $10 billion cloud computing contract that the National Security Agency awarded to Amazon Web Services in July, Nextgov reported Friday.
“GAO found certain aspects of the agency’s evaluation to be unreasonable and, in light thereof, recommended that NSA reevaluate the proposals consistent with the decision and make a new source selection determination,” Ralph White, managing associate general counsel for the procurement law division at GAO, told the publication in a statement.
The contract, also known as “WildandStormy,” awarded to Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) cloud subsidiary is part of the NSA’s effort to modernize its GovCloud platform, the intelligence community’s classified data repository. NSA plans to use the contract to facilitate the migration of foreign surveillance, signals intelligence and other data from various repositories into an internally run data lake that can be used by IC analysts.
A spokesperson for the NSA told the publication that the agency respects GAO’s oversight and will work to ensure that the cloud capabilities can be fielded in a way consistent with the congressional watchdog’s findings while supporting NSA’s mission.
“The Hybrid Compute Initiative remains a priority for NSA, and we will continue to work through the source selection process to acquire this critical capability for the national security,” the spokesperson added.
