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| Microsoft challenges Amazon over cloud contracts |
Microsoft filed a complaint against the NSA with the Government Accountability Office, questioning the award of cloud computing contracts.
The protest was filed on July 21 to challenge the NSA's decision to award Amazon a $10 billion contract.
The NSA contract with Amazon was signed after the Pentagon decided to terminate its $10 billion cloud contract (known as the Joint Defense Project for Cloud Infrastructure JEDI).
The JEDI contract, which ignited a long-running legal battle between tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, has become one of the Pentagon's most complicated contracts.
The NSA contract is also worth $10 billion and is called WildandStormy. It aims to modernize the storage of confidential data of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A spokesperson for the National Security Agency said in a statement that the agency had recently awarded a cloud computing service contract. He did not want to reveal any other details in this regard.
He said: The bidder who was unsuccessful in the bid protested against the State Audit Bureau. The spokesperson added that the agency is responding to the protests in accordance with relevant federal regulations.
"Based on the decision, we will file an administrative protest with the Government Accountability Office," a spokesperson for the software giant said in a statement. We exercise our legal rights carefully and responsibly.
The goal of the JEDI Cloud Contract is to modernize the IT operation of services provided by the Pentagon for up to 10 years.
A new battle between Microsoft and Amazon
The software giant won the cloud computing contract in 2019, overtaking market leader AWS.
A month later, AWS filed a lawsuit in the US Federal Supreme Court protesting the JEDI decision.
The company argued that former President Donald Trump's biases against Amazon and then-CEO Jeff Bezos influenced the award of the Pentagon contract to Microsoft.
Last year, the Pentagon's inspector general published a 313-page report stating that the White House did not appear to have affected the contract.
However, the inspector general noted in the report that he had limited cooperation with White House officials throughout the reporting period. As a result, he was unable to complete his assessment of the allegations of moral misconduct.
A Pentagon official said the process itself was not necessarily the main reason for the change in practice. Given how much the landscape had changed during the intervention, the agency decided that their needs had changed, too.