CIA awards intel community’s cloud contract to several vendors

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has awarded its new multivendor cloud contract to a few companies, the spy organization confirmed Friday.

Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Oracle all confirmed to C4ISRNET they had been awarded the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract, which will serve as the intelligence community’s cloud environment. NextGov, which first broke the news, reported Google as an additional winner.

The CIA declined to confirm specific vendors to C4ISRNET.

“We are excited to work with the multiple industry partners awarded the Intelligence Community (IC) Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) Cloud Service Provider (CSP) contract and look forward to utilizing, alongside our IC colleagues, the expanded cloud capabilities resulting from this diversified partnership,” CIA spokesperson Chelsea Robinson said.

The CIA declined to provide the contract value, though contract documents obtained by NextGov in 2019 stated it could be valued in the “tens of billions.” The draft request for proposals, released in February 2020 and obtained by C4ISRNET, was considering a 15-year performance period, a five-year base and two five-year options.

The C2E contract is a follow-on award to the intel community’s Commercial Cloud Services contact. AWS was the sole provider for that contract, which was worth $600 million.

“We are honored to continue to support the intelligence community as they expand their transformational use of cloud computing. Together, we’re building innovative solutions across all classification levels that deliver operational excellence and allow for missions to be performed faster and more securely,” an AWS spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, which won the Defense Department’s single-award, controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, said the company was “eager” to work with the intel community.

“We applaud the intelligence community in advancing its cloud strategy to the next phase in order to take advantage of the latest commercially available cloud technologies,” the AWS spokesperson said.

Jay Bellisimo, IBM’s general manager for the U.S. public and federal market, said that the company “is proud to further its collaboration with the U.S. federal government.”

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