Amazon Protest of the Department of Defense's JEDI Cloud Contract Award to Microsoft

Abstract

In September 2017, the Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum calling for the adoption of a Department of Defense (DOD) enterprise-wide cloud services solution. As part of its ongoing technology modernization efforts, DOD sought to acquire a commercial cloud services solution known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud. In April 2019, DOD selected Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (henceforth Amazon) to contend for the contract award from qualified proposals submitted by IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. In October 2019, DOD announced it had awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft. The contract award process was contentious, attracting significant industry and congressional interest. Oracle filed pre-award bid protests with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and U.S. Court of Federal Claims (COFC). GAO and COFC ruled against Oracle; however, Oracle is in the process of appealing the COFC decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In November 2019, Amazon filed a post-award bid protest with COFC, alleging potentially improper "political influence" in DOD's award decision and "clear deficiencies" in the contract evaluation process. Many observers trace Amazons accusation of political influence in part to President Donald Trump's July 2019 remarks that his Administration would "take a very strong look" at the JEDI Cloud acquisition process. While Amazon was expected by some analysts to win the JEDI contract, due in part to its extensive data center infrastructure and compliance with DOD cloud security requirements for hosting classified information, other analysts have speculated that Microsoft prevailed over Amazon based on offering a lower-priced solution, as well as the companys existing business relationships with the Department.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 02, 2019
Accession Number
AD1112976

Entities

People

  • Heidi M. Peters

Organizations

  • Library of Congress

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cloud Computing
  • Commerce
  • Computers
  • Congress
  • Contracts
  • Cybersecurity
  • Data Centers
  • Department Of Defense
  • Government Procurement
  • Governments
  • Infrastructure
  • Law
  • Military Acquisition
  • National Security
  • Procurement
  • Small Business
  • Test And Evaluation
  • United States
  • United States Government
  • Web Service

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Government Contracting/Procurement.