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by ross2990 2254 days ago
When JEDI was first proposed, AWS had already been the vast majority of cloud services for the Intelligence community. This led to them having a distinct advantage because they already had the certified infrastructure to handle US Secret and Top Secret information. This was (in my own thoughts) why that immediate capability was stressed so much in the initial request for proposal.
3 comments
partiallypro 2254 days ago
More likely the Amazon lobbied hard to make requirements a barrier to entry:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-...

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-departmen...

https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/D...

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sailfast 2254 days ago
First off - I don't know that it's normal for a competing company in a protest to post a press release like this. I know things have gotten nuts recently and people protest for giggles these days, but this seems... weird.

I also wonder to a certain extent why additional ceiling was not added under the current vehicle to do this if AWS was the preferred solution. MOUs signed, dollars routed, etc seems to be the easiest route rather than a massive procurement for something like this. It doesn't make any sense unless they're awarding an entirely new data center.

It also sounds like there's a disagreement about a core requirement / availability definitions which significantly impact storage costs, which obviously would change one's bid? https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252480585/AWS-hits-out-a...

DoD IG Report on the process: https://www.scribd.com/document/456555063/Report-on-the-Join...

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blackflame7000 2254 days ago
The intelligence community uses SIPRNet or JWICS, not AWS that can be breached by some dev-ops as evidenced by the capital one incident.
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mr_overalls 2253 days ago
In addition to those systems, they use an Amazon-built private cloud.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

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jlgaddis 2253 days ago
> The intelligence community uses SIPRNet or JWICS ...

... and AWS GovCloud [0].

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[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/government/

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