Amazon Web Services has won a potential $10 billion cloud computing contract from the National Security Agency, Nextgov reported Tuesday.
According to the report, the contract awarded to Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) cloud subsidiary appears to be part of the NSA’s effort to update its GovCloud platform, the intelligence community’s classified data repository.
In February 2020, John Sherman, then chief information officer of the IC, announced NSA’s plans to issue a solicitation for the effort, also known as the Hybrid Compute Initiative, to help the agency address its massive processing and analytical requirements.
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) challenged the NSA contract award by filing a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office on July 21. GAO is expected to decide on the protest by Oct. 29.
The award marks the second multibillion-dollar contract the IC has awarded for cloud computing services. In November, the CIA awarded AWS, Google, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) positions on the potential 15-year Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract, which could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars based on the agency’s 2019 procurement documents.
The latest award comes as intelligence, defense and other federal agencies continue to advance modernization efforts.
Ensono surveyed public sector leaders for the Cloud Clarity report and found that 71 percent of respondents said they use a combination of public and private cloud platforms. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they consider security as a top factor in selecting a cloud service provider.
“We see more government organizations utilizing both private and public cloud services, as well as a mix of legacy tools, that can be tailored to the specific needs of each sector or department. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or public cloud provider for the public sector. The desire for multi-cloud solutions isn’t exclusive to the federal government either, as we see state and local agencies also utilizing a mix of private and public cloud,” Clint Dean, vice president of state and local government and education at Ensono, told GovCon Wire.
