Cloud Contracting at the Department of Justice in Fiscal Year 2018

Unlike the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which I profiled last week, the Department of Justice has been very low key about its use of cloud computing over the last few years. That’s why the DOJ’s latest cloud contracts award data for Fiscal 2018 jumped out at me when I complied the numbers. They shows that like DHS, the total value of DOJ’s awarded cloud contracts (TCV) hit a new high almost 4x greater than the previous year’s total.

Where the Growth Happened

Several of the DOJ’s components upped their award totals with TCV growing by three and four digits (percentage-wise) at some of the largest organizations, including the FBI (729%) and the DEA (7,353%). The picture, however, is not uniformly rosy. The cloud contract TCV at the Bureau of Prisons, for example, declined by 35% while at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms it fell a more precipitous 98%.

Given the increases at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, and DEA I’ll drill into their results to see what efforts contributed to their TCV numbers. The tables below shows all efforts for which contracts greater than $1M were awarded.

Here is the data for the EO USA. Notice that three of the efforts involve support services and licenses for Broadsoft’s cloud-based unified communications capability, which the EO USA seems to be rolling out on an enterprise basis. Okta is a cloud-based identity access management capability, so it is fair to say that the EO USA is using it to secure its new mobile communications infrastructure. Panzura and CleverSafe, meanwhile, are data management and object storage capabilities.

The table above shows the top awards at the FBI. The Grey Wolf effort is for network systems and services, including the construction of cloud infrastructure. The Adobe Insight requirement is self-explanatory, as is the Atlassian award, which is for agile development project management.

Lastly, the major efforts at the DEA are all related to the ongoing implementation of cloud storage and data lake infrastructure, basically IaaS work.

Concluding Thought

The award data presented here shows that the total value of contracts awarded by DOJ rose 507% from FY 2016 to FY 2018. This kind of rise shows that the DOJ is becoming much more comfortable with cloud computing for a lot of its major communications and computing infrastructure uses. Justice components are using these bot on-premise and off, contributing to the construction of a hybrid cloud environment.