Leaders at the Pentagon have announced that they are reviewing the needs and specification of proposed switch to a Cloud computing system, called JEDI, and jeopardizing a $10 billion contract it had previously awarded to Microsoft.
As reported by US News & World Report, the Microsoft contract is being challenged on a number of legal front, the least of which is not a challenge from Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services was largely considered the favorite for the contract until Donald Trump voiced his opposition to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper Trump frequently claimed exhibited biased against him.
“We are going to have to assess where we are in regards to the ongoing litigation and determine what the best path forward is for the department,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Jamal Brown said, citing remarks by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks at a public forum late last month.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Project, known as JEDI, is the largest and most comprehensive part of taking the US Department of Defense to a cloud infrastructure, with Microsoft at the helm of the project. All that came to a half with the ongoing lawsuit from AWS, which is contending in court cases that Donald Trump exercised undue influence in the contracting process.
Investigations within the Pentagon reported that the White House did not exert pressure on the contracting process, although the DoD Inspector General said they were not allowed to review applicable documents or interview people because of White House interference.
“So for all of those reasons, moving to a cloud architecture is going to be vital to how we innovate in this department and we’re going to have to assess where we are with regard to the ongoing litigation around JEDI and determine what the best path forward is for the department,” Hicks said April 30.