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expansion / An aerial photograph of the NSA.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been named the winner of the National Security Agencys $ 10 billion cloud computing contract called Wild and Stormy.But Microsoft is definitely still salty Amazons Successful Challenge to Redmonds $ 10 Billion Jedi Contract Together with the Pentagon, he submitted a formal bid protest to the Government Treasury last month.

Microsoft says Microsoft would have won if the NSA had properly evaluated the bid. GAO plans to determine the outcome of the protest by the end of October.News first reported by trade magazine Washington technology..

This award and protest comes as US intelligence agencies have considered overhauling computing and storage resources over the past few years. Today, many agency cloud operations use so-called GovCloud products from various vendors, such as Amazons AWS and Microsofts Azure. The first move to the cloud was facilitated years ago by the exponential growth of data collected and analyzed by intelligence agencies. The increase outweighed the capacity of institutions to keep everything in-house. AWS was an early winner, winning a $ 600 million contract with the CIA in 2013.

After years of using GovCloud services tailored for the intelligence community, the NSA, CIA, and Pentagon have sought bids for new cloud computing contracts. In November, the CIA announced an award for the tens of billions of dollars worth of a 15-year commercial Cloud Enterprise program. Granted to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM. As agencies meet different needs, the five companies compete for subcontracting.

Little is known about the NSAs Wild and Stormy program, but it appears to be part of the NSAs Hybrid Compute Initiative. This initiative combines traditional cloud services with one of the leading companies HaaS (Hardware-as-a-Service) products. Greg Smithberger, NSA Chief Information Officer, said: Janes last year. Its unclear if he was referring to AWS at the time.

The HaaS requirement stems from the fact that the NSA states that some of its applications require more specialized computing. There are some [network] A little more exotic work There are some works that are a little difficult to refactor and move to [commercial] Cloud services, said Smithberger.

The hybrid approach allows the NSA to offload more operational management and work with the same provider to divide more traditional and more specialized storage and computing needs.

The NSA is always up and running at very high capacities. Its always like a full-blown jet engine given the NSAs requirements, said Pentagon CIO John Sherman. It states as follows. FedScoop.. There is no resilience about what is happening on the mission at Fort Meade, he added. The software they have on GovCloud may need to run on bare metal, which can further improve performance.

AWS has been providing cloud computing to the intelligence community for almost a decade, offering a greater advantage than its competitors. In recent years, Microsoft has responded to these contracts by building the following equipment: Certification Process secret data and top secret data.

However, despite Microsofts presence in this area, AWS continues to dominate. [The NSAs award] Amazon is still a cloud provider that beats the entire federal government, said Bloomberg government analyst Chris Cornilly. Nextgov.. Microsoft has come a long way and has become a two-way horse race in the government, but Amazon had a relationship 10 years ago and was collecting security certifications. Microsoft is still catching up.

Microsoft says the NSA needs to cancel its $ 10 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon

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Microsoft says the NSA needs to cancel its $ 10 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon - Illinoisnewstoday.com