How the DoD’s Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) will improve mission-supporting cloud performance and security

The Department of Defense (DoD) has officially launched the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), the first-ever series of contracts that will establish enterprise cloud computing services for the entire department. These contracts will shine a spotlight on the need to optimize cloud performance and security.

JWCC won’t be mandatory. But it will serve as the only DoD vehicle that will bring cloud offerings that are authorized to handle unclassified, secret, and top secret-level data. In December, the Pentagon awarded a total of $9 billion for up to five years to four companies – Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle – with each company operating under its own single-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract.

JWCC is replacing the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative, which was also intended to establish enterprise-class cloud capabilities for the military community but was canceled because military officials claimed it no longer sufficed due to “evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances.”

JWCC ensures a more secure environment

We perceive JWCC as a very positive development, especially from a security perspective. With its focus on a single provider, the JEDI contract would have put all the military’s “eggs in one basket.” But this, however, results in a single vendor for cyber adversaries to target, making it easier for them to launch a massive attack that could take down the DoD’s cloud environment and disrupt missions.

A multicloud environment greatly helps avoid such a foreboding scenario and, besides, this is where the DoD has been heading anyway with initiatives such as Cloud One.

We believe JWCC should continue in this direction, with the four major vendors combining for a multicloud foundation. There could even be smaller companies adding their own offerings to the mix. The diversification and distribution of resources will make it much more difficult for our enemies to compromise military operations with a single cloud strike.

Better decisions via improved cloud performance

From a broader perspective, JWCC tells agencies and their stakeholders that the DoD recognizes how critical a role the cloud plays – and will continue to play – in achieving mission objectives and executing overall military strategies. Battles are now fought in cyberspace, just as they are fought on the ground, in the air, and at sea. Our intelligence and military communities depend upon cloud-enabled, real-time updates to get the right data to the right people at the right time. With optimized cloud performance, they make better decisions in minutes or even seconds. With anything less, teams are insufficiently armed and otherwise left potentially unprepared for battle.

Regardless of which direction JWCC takes, we’re certain the multicloud environment will be a complex one. Agencies will need to know where their workloads are running all the time, understand where and how all of the pieces are connecting, and whether they’re achieving optimal cloud performance. Teams can’t afford to “fly blind.”

Dynatrace delivers optimal cloud performance through observability

As in the private sector, the U.S. government struggles to obtain adequate visibility and oversight of its cloud environments. In fact, less than one in ten organizations has a centralized data management system or platform.

By partnering with Dynatrace, teams can utilize a unified platform, the Software Intelligence Platform, for instant observability of all systems in one place. Dynatrace delivers automatic and intelligent observability across multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructure. It also provides continuous runtime application security and advanced AIOps and automation, so teams never have to fly blind again. Instead, they establish always-on awareness and control over their multicloud environments to ensure optimum cloud performance.

With Dynatrace, teams can continuously observe and capture all data from logs, metrics, and end-to-end traces generated from tools supporting battlefield communications, shipboard operations, aircraft refueling, disaster response, and so on. From there, the Dynatrace AI engine, Davis, provides context-aware software intelligence for creating baselines to distinguish “normal” activity from that which can disrupt systems and the missions that depend upon them.

The Dynatrace federal team works closely with DoD customers to ensure their IT and security teams can see all cloud activity – everywhere – so teams can immediately identify and resolve any issue that could potentially disrupt or even shut down operations. For agencies that utilize JWCC resources, Dynatrace provides a single source of truth, not a single point of failure. To learn more about how Dynatrace can help solve your cyber system’s problems using automatic and intelligent observability and other offerings, please contact us.