Microsoft ‘on track’ for Pentagon contract
Software company seeks to compete with Amazon
Washington - Microsoft is on track to catch up with Amazon.com by obtaining top federal security authorisations early in 2019, bolstering the company’s position in the Pentagon’s winner-take-all competition for a multibillion-dollar cloud computing deal. The software company said on Tuesday it would earn the certification required to host the government’s most sensitive and classified information – a distinction held only by Amazon Web Services – by the end of the first quarter of 2019. Microsoft’s announcement comes just four days before tech companies submit bids for the defence department’s cloud contract, which is widely seen to favour Amazon. The project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure cloud, or Jedi, involves transitioning massive amounts of defence department data to a commercially operated cloud system. Bids for the project, which could last as long as 10 years and be valued at as much as $10bn, are due on October 12. Microsoft said in June that it was ...
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