CIA awards massive cloud contract

The CIA confirmed the award of its Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract to roll out new cloud hosting capabilities for the 17 intelligence agencies.

Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle will compete for task orders over the next 15 years under a contract that could be worth tens of billions of dollars, according to previously released procurement documents.  The CIA never disclosed an exact ceiling value.

C2E is the follow-on contract to the predecessor Commercial Cloud Services, or C2S, project that Amazon Web Services was awarded in 2013 to begin implementing cloud computing at the CIA and certain other intelligence agencies.

But unlike C2S, the CIA this time around opted to bring aboard multiple commercial cloud providers that will vie for work to provide both the hosting capability at the infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service levels.

The C2S contract runs to 2023, and AWS remains the only cloud infrastructure company to hold all needed security classifications for hosting data and workloads up to the top secret levels, while Microsoft is one step below but working toward that designation.

Nextgov first reported the story, which the CIA confirmed in a statement to Washington Technology, a sibling site to GCN.

This article was first published on Washington Technology, a Defense Systems partner site.