AWS makes strongest pitch for $10bn Pentagon project

Washington, June 12 (IANS) With the US Department of Defense (DoD) $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to be announced soon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday made a strong pitch for the intelligence agencies to adopt a secure, agile and faster Cloud.

The Pentagon has selected Microsoft and AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, as two finalists for its $10 billion JEDI cloud contract, likely to be announced on July 19.

"In 2013, when we earned the US intelligence communtiy business, Cloud was picking up. Today, we have earned the reputation among the US intelligence agencies with providing utmost security, agility, speed along with our AI and ML capabilities that has changed the way they compute data," AWS CEO Andy Jassy told the gathering at the Public Sector Summit here.

According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are really encouraged to see more and more of the US Department of Defense customers already moving to the cloud.

"We're so excited our national security continues to break barriers with what they are doing with AWS. With our GovCloud and our classified regions, there are now no barriers today at all for the U.S. Department of Defense to be able to use the AWS cloud," she said during her keynote address.

"JEDI represents an example in DOD that they are really seeking to raise the latest technologies to the cloud. So they can perform their mission better, faster and in a more secure manner," Carlson emphasised.A

The JEDI Cloud computing contract at the US Department of Defence (DoD) is aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider.

Oracle and IBM are already out of the JEDI race.