NSA Awards Secret $10 Billion Contract to Amazon

 The National Security Agency has awarded a secret cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon Web Services, Nextgov has learned.

The contract is already being challenged. Tech giant Microsoft filed a bid protest on July 21 with the govt Accountability Office fortnight after being notified by the NSA that it had selected AWS for the contract.

The contract’s code name is “WildandStormy,” consistent with protest filings, and it represents the second multibillion-dollar cloud contract the U.S. intelligence community—made from 17 agencies, including the NSA—has awarded within the past year.

In November, the CIA awarded its C2E contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, to 5 companies—AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM—that will compete for specific task orders surely intelligence needs.

Details on the NSA’s newly awarded cloud contract are sparse, but the acquisition appears to be a part of the NSA’s plan to modernize its primary classified data repository, the Intelligence Community GovCloud.

For the higher a part of a decade, the NSA has moved its data, including SIGINT and other foreign surveillance and intelligence it ingests from multiple repositories round the globe, into this internally operated data lake analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies can run queries and perform analytics against.

In 2020, intelligence officials signaled an intent to usher in a billboard cloud provider to satisfy demands caused by exponential data growth and large processing and analytics requirements that are challenging the NSA’s ability to scale. the trouble, called the Hybrid Compute Initiative, would effectively move the NSA’s assets intelligence data from its own servers to servers operated by a billboard cloud provider.  

Another win for Amazon

Amazon Web Services is parent company Amazon’s most profitable business unit, and while industry analysts consider it the market leader in cloud computing, it's also the dominant cloud provider among federal agencies, the Department of Defense and therefore the Intelligence Community. AWS first inked a $600 million cloud contract with the CIA called C2S in 2013, through which it provided cloud services to the CIA and sister intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Last year, AWS secured a minimum of some of the CIA’s multibillion-follow-on C2E contract. Microsoft twice won the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract over AWS, but Defense officials cancelled that accept July after years of litigation.

“[The NSA’s award] just reiterates that Amazon remains the cloud provider to beat across the federal,” said Chris Cornillie, an analyst at Bloomberg Government. “Microsoft has come an extended way and made it a two way race in government, but Amazon was forming relationships and gathering security certifications a decade ago and Microsoft remains playing catch-up.”

AWS referred inquiries to the NSA.

"NSA recently awarded a contract for cloud computing services to support the Agency. The unsuccessful offeror has filed a protest with the govt Accountability Office. The Agency will answer the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations," an NSA spokesperson told Nextgov.

 during a statement to Nextgov, Microsoft confirmed its protest.

"Based on the choice we are filing an administrative protest via the govt Accountability Office. We are exercising our legal rights and can do so carefully and responsibly," a Microsoft spokesperson told Nextgov.

The Government Accountability Office is predicted to issue a choice on Microsoft’s protest by Oct. 29.