US Army Plans $1B Cloud Contract

The contract vehicle, called the Enterprise Application Modernization and Migration, should be awarded by the end of June.

The U.S. Army plans to offer a contract vehicle of about $1 billion for migrating existing systems to the cloud, according to multiple media reports.

The contract vehicle, called the Enterprise Application Modernization and Migration (EAMM), should be awarded by the end of June, according to the Federal News Network. The Army has the option for multiple vendors.

The Army will operate the contract from the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency. The goal is to help commands simplify migration contracts and see all the technical options for migrations, according to Federal News Network.

[RELATED: Verizon Wins $1.58B Deal To Outfit U.S. Embassies With Next-Gen IT]

CRN has reached out to the Army for comment.

The contract vehicle was announced as part of a plan for cutting down the number of data centers, with the goal of getting down to five. In fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30, the Army moved about 100 applications to the cloud, according to GovernmentCIO Magazine.

The Army plans to sunset 103 systems during fiscal year 2023 and reduce the number of owned applications and systems by 50 percent before fiscal year 2025 or 2026, according to Identity, credential and access management (ICAM) and secure access service edge (SASE) are other areas of focus for the Army this fiscal year.

Also of interest to the Army is implementing zero trust cybersecurity architecture, according to Breaking Defense. The U.S. Department of Defense, which includes the Army, is also on a path to implement zero trust architecture in the next five years, with an official strategy expected from the DoD this year.

Although the DoD still has a cloud contract vehicle of its own, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC—the successor of the controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI— the Army will need EAMM in addition to JWCC, according to DefenseScoop. JWCC is expected to be awarded in December.

In other recent news around major government contracts, Verizon won a $1.58 billion deal to modernize U.S. embassies, consulates and other key locations around the globe, Amazon Web Services beat out Microsoft over a $10 billion National Security Agency cloud contract and Microsoft and AWS are feuding over a $1 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency contract.