CIA looks for alternative to Amazon data centers: tender for tens of billions is announced

Project Progress

2019: Declaration of the tender

In March, 2019 the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced the tender for implementation of cloud services from several suppliers. Project cost, received the name C2E Commercial Cloud Enterprise, is estimated at "tens of billions of dollars".

Before involving in cooperation of several cloud providers, CIA used only services of Amazon Web Services (AWS). That agreement for $600 million for a period of 10 years was signed in 2013.

CIA after many years of use of a cloud only from Amazon involves several suppliers

According to The Washington Post, the new contract from CIA, undoubtedly, will become the field of major competitive confrontation between two the suppliers of commercial cloud services, largest in the USA — Amazon and Microsoft. Besides, fight can join IBM, Oracle and Google.

In a conversation with the edition Sam Gordy, the head of department of IBM, responsible for projects with the federal government, welcomed the solution of CIA to involve several cloud companies at the same time.

The world's largest companies pass to multicloud environments for their security, flexibility and fault tolerance. Approach of CIA to C2E obviously recognizes the value of multicloud strategy, urges on the competition, supports outdated applications and provides access of department to future innovations — Gordi said.

According to Bloomberg, on March 22, 2019 the management of CIA held an industry meeting with applicants for accomplishment of the cloud order. Follows from documents which were published according to the results of this meeting that creation of the system processing secret and normal information and also working with data both from land and from the space systems is planned.

The agency is going "buy cloud services directly from the commercial suppliers having the good record of service regarding innovations and high quality of providing cloud services to the big customer base".

The winner will have to support cloud connections on "the tactical edge networks": most likely, it means that a system will be applied to operations on collecting of intelligence information worldwide, and not just within the American systems, The Washington Post tells.

It is going to select the contractor of the project no later than July, 2021. Applications for participation will be accepted till May of the 2020th. CIA she intends to sign one or several contracts for a period of five years or more. Within preparation for the project the agency is going to collect a feedback from market leaders. Besides, still it is necessary to determine the scale of works, strategy and an ultimate goal of the project.

Amazon is considered the key supplier of cloud services for the American government agencies thanks to $600-million to the contract with CIA

Considering long-term cooperation with CIA, Amazon has good chances to receive the new contract. However competitors actively expand the services in public sector and receive necessary certificates. For example, in 2018 cloud services of Azure for 17 government agencies in the USA, including CIA permitted to offer Microsoft.  Then IBM constructed the data center offering private cloud infrastructure for U.S. Army  within the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) program and also provided cloud services  to logistics division of army.

In 2013 IBM conceded to Amazon in the cloud tender then filed a complaint to Accounts Chamber, having pointed that it offered CIA a similar product for the amount, smaller for $93.9 million. Claims of IBM then were not accepted.

Afterwards CIA recognized correctness of the choice of Amazon as the supplier. The assistant to the associate director of CIA on digital innovations Sean Roche called the transaction "reformative", and the former Minister of Defence Jim Mattis publicly praised the agency for results of implementation of cloud services.^[1]

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