After years of fighting over the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud service contract, Microsoft and Amazon now fight over another government deal. The National Security Agency is offering a contract worth up to $10 Billion to help it transition from commercial providers to on-premises servers. Washington Technology first reported that Amazon Web Services won this contest for $10 billion. It is now Microsoft's turn to protest the Government Accountability Office.Washington Technology reports that Microsoft claims the NSA did not conduct a proper assessment while considering a provider to its new project, code-named WildandStormy. NextGov was informed by a spokesperson for the NSA that the agency had confirmed the award and the protests.The decision must be made by October 29thTo meet its processing and analysis requirements, the NSA is pursuing a Hybrid Compute Initiative. However, it may not require as much storage as it once did. AWS has many cloud government contracts. However, the JEDI process exposed Microsoft as a strong competitor. The CIA divided its Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract last year between five companies: Microsoft, Amazon Google, Oracle and IBM. In a blog post by Microsoft, it stated that it was seeking US government accreditation for Azure Government Top Secret regions in order to satisfy the need for greater agility and control in the classified space.Amazon demanded a review of JEDI's contract process. It cited mistakes and obvious bias. Former president Donald Trump intervened, apparently bringing his animosity towards Jeff Bezos, the then-CEO. The DoD eventually decided that the program design did not meet its needs, and ended the plan to pursue a multi-vendor solution called Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. WildandStormy will suffer a similar fate. The GAOs decision on October 29th will be the first step towards an answer.
