IBM Files JEDI Protest

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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Following Oracle, IBM filed an official protest against the U.S. Government's decision to use a single provider for the DoD's JEDI cloud computing platform. According to IBM, "JEDI's primary flaw lies in mandating a single cloud environment for up to 10 years." Google dropped out of the bid amidst AI militarization concerns, but offered similar criticisms. The cloud contract is reportedly worth $10 billion, and bids are supposed to be submitted via DVD between 9PM and 12PM ET today.

Leading global enterprises want clouds that are flexible, provide access to the best applications from multiple vendors, and can smoothly transition legacy systems. JEDI is a complete departure from these best practices. It denies America's warfighters access to the best technology available across multiple vendors, complicates the integration of legacy applications and walls off access to future innovations. JEDI's single-cloud approach also would give bad actors just one target to focus on should they want to undermine the military's IT backbone. The world's largest businesses are increasingly moving in a multi-cloud direction because of security, flexibility and resilience; the Pentagon is moving in precisely the opposite direction.
 
10 years sounds like a long time... but then again this is the same organization requesting submissions via DVD... not sure I have used a DVD player in almost 10 years...

Apparently this is for security reasons -- they can't transmit it over the internet and USB sticks are considered too insecure to introduce to sensitive DoD systems.
 
Apparently this is for security reasons -- they can't transmit it over the internet and USB sticks are considered too insecure to introduce to sensitive DoD systems.


Yup, that and because that's how they've done it for years and I suppose they have seen no reason to change it.
 
Finally, the JEDI solicitation restricts the field of competition. Certain requirements in the RFP either mirror one vendor’s internal processes or unnecessarily mandate that certain capabilities be in place by the bid submission deadline versus when the work would actually begin. Such rigid requirements serve only one purpose: to arbitrarily narrow the field of bidders.

Throughout the year-long JEDI saga, countless concerns have been raised that this solicitation is aimed at a specific vendor. At no point have steps been taken to alleviate those concerns.

I would guess the specific vendor they're referencing is Amazon. A few years ago I got to witness IBM bid on cloud related work with the DoD that they were never going to win as the "capabilities" mandated at the time were only possible with AWS.
 
I'm pretty sure that this is only a two horse race.

I didn't even know Oracle was a cloud provider until I saw ads of theirs slapped all over the DC Metro proclaiming such.
 
Should have went with the SITH progam....

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Monroe doctrine is all but ignored, Bretton Woods Agreement soon to be dissolved this is not to much to worry about.
 
"Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen." -Revelation 1:7

Every time I hear people talking about "cloud this" and "cloud that" this part of the bible creeps into my mind...

Makes me wonder if Sky-net is real and traveled back in time disguised as "Christ" to better bend humanity to it's will... "I'll be back..."

On a more serious note, IBM and everyone else is salty cause instead of running a near deficit and dumping all your profits back into your business wasn't good enough for the stockholders of all the other companies. Amazon is miles ahead of many offerings because Bezos keeps dumping the money back into the company. The vast majority of tech companies are sitting on a war-chest full of billions, yet refuse to touch it because they don't want to piss of their stockholders and they don't want to pay taxes on it cause its been sitting in an offshore account for years. Like em or not, Amazon doesn't have the same financial woes many of the other tech giants have because you don't have to pay anywhere near the same in taxes if you aren't turning a profit at the end of the year. It also helps smooth things over with local politicians when you employ a half million people...
 
10 years sounds like a long time... but then again this is the same organization requesting submissions via DVD... not sure I have used a DVD player in almost 10 years...

Could be this is a requirement mandated in a defense bill many years ago to bring DoD out of the boxes of paper bid proposal era and no one has gone back and revisited the issue.

As for the 10 years thing, given how long it takes DoD to do an RFP, formulate a plan, get actual bids, pick one, deal with years of protests and challenges, start implementing the thing, discover it won't work as bid, modify the project, ask Congress for more money due to being over budget and finally get something working that offers a fraction of the original request at twice the cost; the DoD probably should start the process for JEDI's replacement today.
 
Before the military develops a cloud they need to get off their ass and get off the internet. It's fine to use IP to send traffic over distance, but they need to develop their own military-specific intranets and replace the 'ISP' model with dissimilar DOD systems that won't even talk to commercial internet equipment, they need point-in and point-out encryption, and they need to develop specialized aircraft that can be scrambled to provide world-wide IP trafficking in case our internet infrastructure is attacked.

Our military strength is based on our global battlefield information system, but we haven't done enough to protect our ability communicate in time of war. A cloud isn't gonna be worth beans if information can't get to the people who need it.
 
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Apparently this is for security reasons -- they can't transmit it over the internet and USB sticks are considered too insecure to introduce to sensitive DoD systems.

This was the case 15 years ago, so I imagine it is still today.
 
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