Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition

Google has decided not to compete in the Pentagon's $10 Billion cloud-computing contract for transfering its data to cloud storage.

The project, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI, involves transitioning massive amounts of Defense Department data to a commercially operated cloud system.
Companies are asked to submit their bids before 12 Oct.

Recently in the past, Google had announced that it is not going to renew its contract for the Pentagon artificial intelligence program. This was a result of a massive protest by its employee against working with the military.

The spokesman at Google said, "Google is going to support US government with our cloud in many ways."

Tech worker Coalition, which advocates for giving employees a say in technology company decisions. And withdraw from cloud competition was the result of “sustained” pressure from tech workers.

Google, unlike amazon and microsoft also doesn't possess the government cloud-security authorizations, which is required for highly sensitive data such as of military.

The JEDI contract attracted widespread interest from technology companies struggling to catch up with Amazon in the burgeoning federal government market for cloud services.
Final requirements were released in July this year, after months long protest from companies with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM against Pentagon's plan of choosing just one winner.

In a report to Congress, the Department of Defense said sharing data with multiple companies under current acquisition law would be a slow process that "could prevent DoD from rapidly delivering new capabilities. "

The department also said it expects "to maintain contracts with numerous cloud providers to access specialized capabilities not available under the JEDI Cloud contract."