CIA Awards C2E Contract to Five Tech Giants

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM have received spots on the CIA's Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract. 

The five contactors may now compete for task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of the Intelligence Community's 17 agencies. The contract could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars based on past procurement documents, Nextgov reported. 

CIA spokeswoman Nicole de Haay told Nextgov that the new collaboration with industry will result in expanded cloud capabilities.

According to Bloomberg Government, the C2E contract has three parts: cloud service provider acquisition, system integrator/multi-cloud management acquisition and niche platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service acquisitions. 

The cloud service acquisition area involves a multiple-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for professional services and essential cloud services such as infrastructure-as-a-service, PaaS and SaaS.

In 2013, the CIA awarded a sole-source contract to AWS to provide a range of cloud computing services for intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the National Security Agency.  

The new award now includes other providers like Google, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, but only AWS will deliver cloud capabilities at all classification levels. AWS' 2013 contract will last through 2023. 

“We are honored to continue to support the intelligence community as they expand their transformational use of cloud computing. Together, we’re building innovative solutions across all classification levels that deliver operational excellence and allow for missions to be performed faster and more securely," AWS told Nextgov.

AWS is a web services provider most widely known for its cloud computing offerings. The company operates data centers in the United States, Europe, Singapore and Japan.