The Pentagon awarded a 10-year, $7.6 billion cloud contract Aug. 29: the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS), a huge contract that hasn’t attracted the attention of the DoD’s far more controversial procurement, known as JEDI.
DEOS was awarded to CSRA, an IT solutions and services company, and its contractors Dell and Minburn Technology. The solutions will be built on the Microsoft Office 365 platform. CSRA was acquired by General Dynamics in 2018.
The DEOS contract will provide “productivity tools,” such as filing sharing, email and spreadsheets. The services replace legacy office applications and will provide the DoD with a “standard cloud-based solution across all military services,” according to the news release.
“DEOS will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings," DoD CIO Dana Deasy said in a statement.
The DoD cloud strategy emphasizes the Pentagon’s reliance on an multicloud, multivendor cloud environment that includes general purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds. The DEOS cloud falls under the fit-for-purpose category, Deasy said.
"DEOS takes advantage of technical, security and contractual lessons from these ongoing pilots, while military services are leveraging them to assess the readiness of their infrastructure to support migration to DEOS,” said Deasy.
The contract has a five-year base period, with two two-year options and a one-year option following. The DoD used the General Services Administration IT Schedule 70, which is used for long-term contracts for GSA-approved technology, for the acquisition.
“[DEOS] will bring cost savings and help DOD easily share mission-critical information across all military services while enhancing cybersecurity and reducing costs," said GSA administrator Emily Murphy.
The services provided by DEOS will have direct effect on the military services. The Marine Corps deputy director of Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Kenneth Bible said it looks forward to the “promise and substantial benefits” of the DEOS contract.
"We are hopeful that it will supply the ability to operate within the disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth [DDIL] environments that are anticipated in 21st century conflicts,” said Bible.
The government is in the process of migrating several systems across federal agencies to the cloud. Earlier this summer, OMB released its Cloud Smart Strategy, that served as guidance for agencies moving applications the cloud.
DEOS is one of two massive DoD cloud computing contracts that government and industry have been waiting for the Pentagon to award. The other is the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, better known as JEDI, which is potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years and will serve as the Pentagon’s enterprisewide general services cloud. That contract has been continuously delayed and is currently in federal court.
Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.
