The Pentagon’s next iteration of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, dubbed “JWCC Next,” will offer enhanced financial oversight and clarity on cloud spending, according to Department of Defense (DOD) Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies.
Under the Trump administration, the DOD has been rebranded as the Department of War.
“We are expanding JWCC into a unified cloud marketplace, integrating additional providers, embedding financial operations, automation, and multi-cloud management to enable enterprise cost control and interoperability,” Davies said during a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity hearing on March 24.
The JWCC Next initiative, which follows the original JWCC contract, is expected to launch in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.
In 2022, the DOD awarded Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft spots on the 10-year, $9 billion JWCC contract vehicle. The program allows for each of the vendors to compete for task orders and deliver cloud computing, storage, and other services across the department. That contract has already generated more than $3 billion in task orders.
Davies told lawmakers that the department is taking lessons from the current JWCC program as it looks to deploy JWCC Next.
One key lesson she noted is the inefficiencies in how cloud services are currently managed, with multiple contracts and authorization points across the department.
“Is this the most efficient way to be driving cloud compute? It’s not,” Davies said. “JWCC Next is going to provide us that financial transparency, and it will also improve asset identification and security by providing better oversight of cloud resources.”
Davies also told lawmakers that the updated contract aims to improve the DOD’s ability to track and manage cloud expenditures across its operations. Additionally, she explained that JWCC Next will broaden access to a wider array of commercial cloud providers.