Microsoft wins Pentagon's USD 10 billion cloud computing contract

The US Department of Defence on Friday awarded its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract worth USD 10 million to Microsoft, bringing an end to a closely scrutinized contest involved companies like Amazon, Oracle, Google, and IBM.

The 10-year contract, which is intended to transform and modernise the US military's cloud computing system, is considered significant, owing to its centrality to "new forms of war". Presently, much of the US military operates on computer systems from the 1980s and 1990s, the New York Times pointed out.

"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.

The development has come as a surprise given that Amazon had been considered a front-runner to win the contract, while Microsoft was considered in the lead for other government cloud programs, including an intelligence contract.

Amazon has responded to the development, saying that it was surprised by the decision.

"AWS (Amazon Web Services, which is company's cloud platform) 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.