Tech corporations argue over $ 10 billion NSA deal
Amazon and Microsoft are fighting for a multi-billion dollar NSA cloud contract. (Photo: Carsten Reisinger / Shutterstock)
Amazon brought the project down with its lawsuit against the award of a Pentagon contract to Microsoft. Now Microsoft strikes back with the NSA contract to Amazon.
It’s about long-term government contracts and it’s worth billions. After months of tug-of-war over a ten billion dollar cloud contract awarded by the Pentagon to Microsoft, the Amazon lawsuit brought against the decision finally brought down the Jedi project entirely at the beginning of July. Now something similar could happen to Amazon, because Microsoft has filed a complaint against the award of a cloud contract from the NSA that Amazon had previously got hold of.
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NSA relies on AWS for cloud project
The NSA plans to outsource data and its management from its own servers to an external cloud infrastructure. The authority opted for Amazon’s AWS. In the coming years, around ten billion US dollars should flow for this, as The Verge reports. The order volume therefore roughly corresponds to that of the failed Pentagon project.
While Amazon cited political reasons in its objection – ex-US President and Amazon’s intimate enemy Donald Trump is said to have had a hand in the surprisingly unsuccessful award of the Pentagon Jedi project to Microsoft – Microsoft is concerned the cloud market. According to Microsoft, the NSA did not sufficiently evaluate the market for its project called Wildandstormy.
GOA will decide on Microsoft’s lawsuit at the end of October
Microsoft addressed the complaint to the US Government Accountability Office (GOA), which is due to make a decision by the end of October. The NSA has meanwhile acknowledged receipt of the complaint and stated that the authority will respond to it within the framework of the relevant regulations.
The Pentagon emphasized in July that it was giving up the Jedi project as such, but was relying on several providers for the potential follow-up project, Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. Last year, the CIA distributed a cloud contract to several companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle and IBM. So it is possible that the NSA will also take such a path to avoid possible delays in the project through a legal dispute.
