US Army reportedly planning $1B cloud migration contract

CLOUD

The U.S. Army is planning to issue a cloud migration contract worth about $1 billion as part of its information technology modernization efforts. 

Officials detailed the Enterprise Application Modernization and Migration, or EAMM, contract, on Thursday. Multiple suppliers are expected to participate. The EAMM contract is structured as an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity agreement, a type of procurement agreement that allows the buyer to receive an unlimited quantity of products or services for a fixed time frame.

The contract is expected to be awarded by July 2023. From there, cloud migration initiatives procured through the agreement will be managed by the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency. The agency, which was launched in 2019, helps coordinate the Army’s cloud computing projects.

Federal News Network reported that one objective of the EEAM contract is to speed up cloud migration projects. Currently, the procurement process involved in migrating an on-premises Army system to the cloud can reportedly take several months. The EAMM contract will make it possible to issue “task orders for all the services a system might need” as part of a cloud migration in as little as four weeks.

The Army is also seeking to streamline application modernization initiatives in other ways. The plan, officials detailed this week, is to more actively assist Army commands with the technical aspects of moving an application to the cloud. Commands will also receive assistance in other areas, such as procurement. 

In 2022, the Army reportedly migrated about 100 on-premises systems to the cloud. It also discontinued 66 legacy systems, including two large deployments of enterprise resource planning software. It’s estimated that the Army still has about 3,500 systems operating in on-premises data centers.

Officials announced the EAMM contract alongside an update to a cloud adoption plan that the Army released in 2020. According to Federal News Network, the latest version of the plan places a stronger emphasis on creating a cloud environment that spans multiple infrastructure-as-a-service platforms and on-premises data centers.

The EAMM procurement program is the latest in a series of ten-figure contracts developed over recent years as part of cloud adoption initiatives in the public sector.

In April, the U.S. National Security Agency awarded a $10 billion cloud computing deal to Amazon Web Services Inc. The U.S. Department of Defense, in turn, is currently evaluating bids from AWS, Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp. for its Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract. The contract is expected to be worth up to $9 billion over several years. 

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