The Department of Defense’s enterprise-wide cloud environment has been years in the making, but now, the wheels are really beginning to turn. In December 2022, the DOD awarded its long-awaited $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract to four industry cloud service providers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle — marking the beginning of a new era for DOD’s cloud adoption journey.
Executive Mosaic spoke with Rick Wagner, president of Microsoft Federal, in an exclusive video interview to learn more about what Microsoft will bring to the table for JWCC.
“JWCC will allow the DOD to bring the best capabilities from across the entire spectrum of the commercial providers,” Wagner said in conversation with Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt.
Specifically for Microsoft, these capabilities include the company’s previous cloud work on all classification levels, security, artificial intelligence, software development and others, “all in support of providing data at the edge where the warfighters need it, where they make decisions,” Wagner explained.
Wagner, a six-time Wash100 Award winner, also discussed zero trust as an important factor in cloud security. To Wagner, “zero trust is an implementation,” and not a specific solution or product. Wagner said zero trust shifts cybersecurity from a compliance-based approach to an outcome-focused approach, and it requires continuous learning from the workforce.
To learn more about Rick Wagner’s three principles of zero trust and how Microsoft is looking at the JWCC win, watch his full video interview here. Subscribe to Executive Mosaic’s YouTube channel so you don’t miss the next video in our JWCC series!
