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As DISA preps JWCC-Next, Olympus, JOE initiatives take hold
The next version of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Computing contract is coming into focus.
While the final solicitation is still months away, the Defense Department is applying several lessons from the current JWCC vehicle as it completes its acquisition strategy.
John Hale, the chief of product management and development at the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is overseeing JWCC’s acquisition effort, said one of the biggest changes expected in JWCC-Next is not only opening it up to more hyperscale cloud service providers, but expanding the type of cloud service providers who could win a spot on the contract.
John Hale is the chief of product management and development at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
“We’ve made some modifications through the existing JWCC contract since we awarded it and most of those have been around getting access to the third-party vendors that are included with the large hyperscale providers,” Hale said in an interview with Federal News Network. “What we have learned as mission partners move to a particular hyperscale provider, they don’t just want that capability provided by that provider, they want all of the ancillary services that are provided as part of that ecosystem. So how do we get to that, and how do we provide that capability to a warfighter, rather than have them to do separate contracts for that kind of stuff? That’s where we’re trying to make the changes to get to that.”
Hale, who spoke Thursday at the Defense One DoD Cloud Workshop, said that means if a service wants access to a specific application that already is using infrastructure from AWS or Azure or Google or Oracle, they want a third party to help them implement that specific software.
DoD’s modification to JWCC aims to help the military services or defense agencies more easily move applications and services to the cloud.
Since the Pentagon awarded JWCC, which has a $9 billion ceiling, in November 2021, the military services or defense agencies have awarded a little over $3 billion in task orders. The military services are seeing the value of JWCC with the Army in June mandating the use of the contract vehicle for all new cloud acquisitions at the secret and unclassified levels.
JWCC-Next solicitation coming in 2026
Hale said DISA plans to release the solicitation for JWCC-Next in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 and make awards by early 2027. DoD has been thinking about the next version of JWCC since 2023 because of how quickly the cloud market has evolved.
“Our plan is to have enough overlap between the award of JWCC-Next and before JWCC, the current contract, expires so that we can do the transition nice and smooth during that that period,” he said.
JWCC is a 10-year contract and would expire in 2031, if DoD picks up all of its options.
While Hale said he couldn’t comment on the timing of any requests for information or even draft requests for proposals, he did say DISA is working closely with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Acquisition and Sustainment office on JWCC-Next.
“We’re working with A&S for two reasons because of the simple scope and scale of the contract. But then also, how do we how can we expand the base period of the contract to a longer period so we have less transitions in the future when mission partners are leveraging the capabilities,” he said. “One of the things we want to get to is through a fair and open competition, making longer term rewards, so that we can then make it less on us, on the mission partners as they transition from one [contract] to another.”
While JWCC-Next is a long-term initiative, DISA is aiming for two other initiatives to deliver new capabilities in the coming months.
One is called Olympus, which is DISA’s infrastructure-as-code initiative.
Hale said DISA plans to change its approach to how it offers Olympus starting next fiscal year.
OCONUS cloud access expanding
“We launched infrastructure-as-code basically two years ago, and the way infrastructure-as-code works is it’s a toolkit which mission partners could then download, manipulate, manage and run it themselves. The feedback we got from a lot of DoD mission partners is, ‘This is great, but we don’t want to run it,’” Hale said. “It’s in a pilot form right now, but we plan on transitioning it to a Defense working capital fund capability starting Oct. 1, so it’ll be available to mission partners to buy. Basically, it is that infrastructure-as-code type capability, but in a managed service format. You simply pay one fee, and then we build your infrastructure-as-code capability for you, so you have that automated management of your cloud environment.”
The benefits of both infrastructure-as-code and making it managed service is two-fold. Hale said first users get better and easier security from the managed service. Second, military services and defense agencies don’t need the expertise to implement, maintain and update the infrastructure.
“Most mission partners are seeing about a seven month reduction from beginning to getting the authority to operate (ATO) of their capability. So when they go to migrate something to the cloud, they’re seeing a large reduction in the initial work required to get into an ATO,” Hale said. “Olympus is trying to drive towards how do we get to that continuous ATO type model for things that are running in a commercial cloud environment and having that capability so that you push the button and you get it quicker.”
The second initiative DISA is expecting progress on is the joint operational edge (JOE) capability. Hale said through this program, DISA is bringing commercial cloud services to commands located outside the continental United States. DISA initially brought JOE to Indo-Pacific Command initially, including Hawaii, Japan, South Korea and Guam, and recently expanded access to the Middle East and European theaters.
“We worked with commercial cloud providers to deploy their infrastructure in our data centers OCONUS. By doing that, we were able to get around the data sovereignty issues by having the systems in our data centers, they’re on U.S. soil, and they follow U.S. data sovereignty rules,” he said. “The initial deployment of JOE was focused on the secret level networks, and so that’s what we’ve flushed out initially. There’s a demand signal for unclassified, impact level (IL) four and five capabilities. We have not provided that as part of the phase one of the JOE effort because we want to see how this goes, make sure that it’s meeting mission needs, and then if everything goes well, then we’ll look at deploying it to other classification levels.”
The post As DISA preps JWCC-Next, Olympus, JOE initiatives take hold first appeared on Federal News Network.
