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posted by martyb on Monday January 28 2019, @03:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-does-it-take-to-win-a-$10B-contract dept.

Pentagon to Review Amazon Employee's Influence Over $10 Billion Government Contract :

The Pentagon is reviewing whether Amazon Web Services created a conflict of interest when it hired a former Defense Department employee who once claimed he was “leading the effort” to help the agency move its computing systems to the cloud, court records show.

Deap Ubhi had worked at AWS before joining the Defense Department and now is back at the company after less than two years — a career path that is now a point of contention in the competition for a $10 billion contract to build and manage much of the cloud computing services for the Pentagon.

[...] Amazon’s competitors argue that the procurement — known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI — is biased in favor of Amazon Web Services, an Amazon business unit that already holds a $600 million contract to run the CIA’s cloud infrastructure. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder, owns The Washington Post.)

Although the contract is not expected to be awarded until the spring, it has already been hit with legal challenges — none of which has been successful. Amazon rivals IBM and Oracle, which also are vying for the contract, filed challenges with the Government Accountability Office in an effort to force the Pentagon to award more than one contract.

Now, in a new lawsuit filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Oracle alleges the Pentagon should more fully examine the role of Ubhi, who left Amazon and began working at the Defense Digital Service in August 2016. (The D.C.-based court hears monetary claims against the federal government.) While at the Defense Digital Service, he eventually worked on the JEDI contract.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:28PM (#793101)

    ... is whether or not CIA and DoD services should be cloud based whatsoever. (Or maybe, if it is insecure enough to be trusted to a cloud instead of directly hosted on servers owned by the government then it never needed to exist in the first place).