Microsoft Wins Pentagon's $10 Billion JEDI Contract, Thwarting Amazon
Last edited Fri Oct 25, 2019, 07:47 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — The Department of Defense on Friday awarded a $10 billion technology contract to Microsoft, in what was a closely scrutinized contest after President Trump said he might intervene in the hard-fought commercial battle. The 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known by the cinematic acronym JEDI, had set off a showdown among Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Google. Intended to transform and modernize the military’s cloud computing systems, the contract is considered more important than its size because of its centrality to new forms of war. Much of the military operates on 1980s and 1990s computer systems, and the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.
The decision was a surprise because Amazon had been considered a front-runner to win the contract. But that was before Mr. Trump began his criticisms of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and, for the past several years, the owner of The Washington Post — a news organization the president refers to as the “Amazon Washington Post.” A speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who over time became an enthusiast of moving Pentagon operations to the cloud, alleged in a book scheduled for publication next week that Mr. Trump had wanted to “screw” Amazon and give the contract to another company. In public, Mr. Trump said there were other “great companies” he wanted to make sure had a chance at the contract.
The issue quickly became radioactive at the Pentagon. The new defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, at first said he wanted to take several months to review the issue and then, a few days ago, recused himself from the bidding. He said he could not participate because his son worked for another competitor for the contract. As recently as this month, the betting was that Microsoft would, at most, get only part of the contract — and that the Pentagon, like many companies, would use multiple suppliers for its cloud services. Microsoft was considered in the lead for other government cloud programs, including an intelligence contract. Its Azure cloud program is considered a worthy competitor, but only recently has Microsoft opened enough classified server facilities to be able to handle data on the scale of the Pentagon contract.
“This contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern cloud infrastructure at all three classification levels delivered out to the tactical edge,” the Defense Department said in a statement on Friday. Microsoft did not immediately have a comment. Amazon, which calls its cloud platform Amazon Web Services, or AWS, said in a statement that it was surprised by the decision. “AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly led to a different conclusion,” Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, said. “We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/dod-jedi-contract.html
Original article -
The decision, announced Friday, was a surprise because Amazon had been considered a front-runner to win the 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known by the cinematic acronym JEDI. But that was before President Trump began his criticisms of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and, for the past several years, the owner of The Washington Post — a news organization the president refers to as the “Amazon Washington Post.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
= new reply since forum marked as read
By Liam Stack
Oct. 24, 2019
Rest easy, people of Earth: The United States’ nuclear arsenal will no longer rely on a computer system that uses eight-inch floppy disks, in an update the Defense Department has cast as a step into the future but which some observers might be surprised to learn was required at all. The system, called Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or SACCS, “is still in use today but no longer uses floppy disks,” David Faggard, a spokesman for the Air Force Global Strike Command, which manages the Air Force portion of the arsenal, said in an email. “Air Force Global Strike Command is committed to modernizing for the future.”
The update is part of a broader overhaul of the United States’ atomic weapons that began under President Barack Obama and has continued under President Trump. The move away from floppy disks was completed in June but was not widely reported at the time. It was reported last week by C4ISRNET, a website that covers military technology.
“The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June,” Justin Oakes, a spokesman for the Eighth Air Force, said in an email. “This replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity and operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message receipt and processing.”
The role of floppy disks in the command and control operations of the nation’s nuclear arsenal was highlighted in a 2016 report from the United States Government Accountability Office. It said the disks were used in a system that “coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear forces.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
No comment.
have laptops stolen from their GOVs. But a long time ago, we had encrypted laptop hard drives to at least help to thwart getting info from them. Of course a hard drive really wasn't as much of a problem as something else - the jump drives/USB sticks. 
and then finally we got a couple 8086s - like 1 per group, and built up from there to replace all the desktops with laptops after a couple decades.
Eventually the machines had smartcard readers (we had PIV cards and I understand that DOD folks had CAC cards) - and getting those secure-access systems to recognize/talk to each other continued to be a piece of work. But at least the PIV just required a PIN. But I had a million other systems I needed to access that required a password that changed every 90 days and each system wanted "x" number of characters as a min or max, and some accepted and/or required one set of symbols but not others as part of a password, whereas other systems allowed all the symbols but might require 15 or more characters as minimum, etc. (and no repeats or similar PWs over a period of 10 PW changes). It was a living nightmare.
Thank goodness I am retired. 
