JEDI - Joyfully Evaluating DoD Infrastructure

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft won the $10B JEDI contract to provide “enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service to support Department of Defense business.” <– (i.e., cloud ☁️)

Obviously, this was a huge win for Microsoft as it was the DoD’s largest IT contract ever. Some highlights from the two year process were President Trump telling his Defense Secretary to “screw Amazon,” Oracle presenting a conspiracy flowchart, and AWS expressing their surprise at losing the deal.

But one of the other things to notice here is the fact that every government organization needs to become a tech organization. Today we often hear that “every company is a tech company,” but moving forward the same will be true of governments.

Because of that, expect to see more stories on “digital nationalism” as governments use technology as a source of competitive advantage. Some recent headlines:

• Big Tech: Breaking us up will only help China (link)
• Amazon runs election software in over 40 states (link)
• The US opened a national security review of TikTok (link)
• Schumer asks FBI, FTC to probe Russia’s FaceApp over security concerns (link)