Acting DOD CIO: Defense Cloud Contract Vehicle is ‘Off to the Races’

The Defense Department’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract is “off to the races” in providing cloud compute for both classified and unclassified operations, said Acting CIO Leslie Beavers speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. Wednesday.

Beavers said JWCC had officially surpassed the $1 billion mark in task orders.

“That means that if you need a cloud capability, and you’re in an organization or a unit, you can order off of this contract, and within 30 days or less, you can have that cloud capability that you can migrate your tools and services into,” Beavers said.

Beavers emphasized that JWCC is “a multi-cloud strategy, and that has naturally grown out into the requirement to have computing storage at the edge. That edge cloud piece is underway. We’ve got a couple of them already deployed to the Pacific, and we’re looking for one to come up in the European theater.”

One of DOD’s key efforts around this included launching pilots centered around emerging tech and working with industry partners like NBC and NASDAQ to collaborate on leveraging AI.

Beavers is also focused on lowering the cost of doing business within DOD by defining criteria around trust and authority to operate (ATO). The department is also reshaping its standards around Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0 to help industry work with government while maintaining security.

“We were really working hard to make it easier to do business with the department and to lower the cost of doing business with the department,” Beavers said. “If you end up with in an impasse, there is a way to get that impasse broken, instead of a couple of folks saying, ‘Yeah, that’s not working for me, and we’re done.’”