7 programs leading government’s push to the cloud

FedScoop looks into some of the government's most ambitious cloud acquisitions that either in planning or underway.

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In recent years, federal agencies have made some ambitious leaps into the cloud, developing sweeping strategies and launching massive acquisitions to onboard flexible, commercial capabilities to support their modernization efforts.

While some federal agencies are still early on in embracing a more wholesale move to the cloud outside, a handful of departments have planted their flags in pursuit of being cloud-enabled organizations.

In fiscal 2020, the federal government spent roughly $6.6 billion on cloud computing, according to Bloomberg. And that’s projected to grow to $7.2 billion or more before the close of fiscal 2021, especially with the new normal of remote work.

FedScoop compiled a list of seven of the largest and most impactful adoptions of cloud capabilities in recent years across the federal government. Notably, many come from the military and intelligence community — organizations that deal with the nation’s most sensitive and often secretive information and therefore must be extra thoughtful and secure when dealing with it in a commercial cloud environment.

This list is part of FedScoop’s Special Report — The Continued Push to the Cloud.

Treasury’s T-Cloud

The Department of the Treasury is developing an enterprise capability that provides a full suite of cloud products, services and support from multiple providers. Called TCloud, the acquisition looks to award a contract to a single vendor to broker cloud usage across the larger Treasury multi-cloud ecosystem to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. And such a job comes with a big price tag, likely more than $1 billion when it’s all said and done.

DOD’s Defense Enterprise Office Solution

While the Department of Defense’s other single-source cloud contract worth billions, JEDI, didn’t live to see the light of day, the department’s Defense Enterprise Office Solution survived a protest period, was re-awarded after corrective action and is now in full operation. Through DEOS, contract holder General Dynamics IT is helping provide cloud-based, enterprise-wide collaboration tools for the DOD at impact levels 5 and 6 both nationwide and for overseas garrisons and operations as part of its larger migration to Microsoft Office and Teams services.

Intelligence Community’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise

The intelligence community has kept things mum in the public space about its Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, the latest iteration of its foray into the cloud space, which started in 2013 with the similarly named Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) procurement. Managed by the CIA, the new multi-cloud contract will have a 15-year period of performance and be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents. In late 2020, the CIA awarded the Cloud Service Provider portion of the contract to provide products such as infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, as well as other professional services to the 17 intelligence community agencies.

Air Force’s Cloud One

While the larger Department of Defense works to acquire an end-to-end, enterprise cloud, the Air Force seems to be doing just fine on its own. The service describes its Cloud One as “the leading provider for state-of-the-art cloud computing platforms, technologies, approaches, and solutions.” And it’s not just available to the Air Force but across the DOD, giving other services access to host systems, environments and applications in the cloud across a variety of providers. “The Cloud One Program Office delivers and sustains war-winning IT capabilities to the DoD through the provisioning of common secure computing environments, standardized platforms, system migration and support services, and data management,” reads the program’s website overview.

DISA’s milCloud 2.0

While the Department of Defense’s larger cloud acquisitions like DEOS and JEDI — and now its replacement, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability — tend to get the biggest spotlight, milCloud 2.0 is a successful, existing vehicle that has been helping get military programs and services into the cloud for more than four years. Awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency to General Dynamics IT subsidiary CSRA in 2017, milCloud 2.0 is a fit-for-purpose commercial cloud service designed to meet the unique mission-critical requirements of the Defense Department and its mission partners in a hybrid environment.

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DHS’s Data Center and Cloud Optimization

The Department of Homeland Security is in the midst of a $3.4 billion cloud computing overhaul, called the Data Center and Cloud Optimization Support Services contract. Under the single-award contract, DHS will migrate its two main data centers to a modern cloud environment. The hope is this new contract will bring DHS greater efficiency, data quality, security and mission support.

DOD’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability

At the Pentagon, JEDI is out and JWCC is in — the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, that is. While the Department of Defense’s new enterprise cloud acquisition is brand new and many details, like its price ceiling, are still a mystery, the department hopes this contract will finally, after years of delay with the beleaguered Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, kick off its journey to an end-to-end cloud infrastructure capability. The department will look to issue multiple direct awards with cloud service providers and is also intending to seek proposals from JEDI-winner Microsoft and its main competitor Amazon. Several years down the road, DOD will also pursue a “larger, full-and-open” multi-cloud procurement.