Microsoft Azure recently had a monumental win against Amazon. A 10 billion dollar contract was awarded to Microsoft, specifically Microsoft Azure for the JEDI program. A few questions might pop up for you. What is Microsoft Azure? What is the JEDI program? In this article we will break down what these are and what makes the topic so important.
Microsoft Azure is the cloud network services that Microsoft provides. Multiple different industries find cloud services from Azure helpful including healthcare, financial services, government, retail, and manufacturing. 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft’s cloud system to help support their business.
The JEDI program is an acronym for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Program. The U.S. Department of Defense picked Microsoft to build a cloud storage system for the military under a 10 year fixed price contract. It is speculated that this could be worth up to 10 billion dollars. This program’s purpose is to eventually fully replace the old computer networks that are integrated with clouds to a single cloud system for all networks.
What makes this a huge accomplishment for Microsoft is that their cloud service was chosen over Amazon’s, Amazon Web Services (AWS). IBM and Oracle were kicked out of the running race back in April because the Department of Defense thought they didn’t meet their Impact Level 6 security requirements for sensitive U.S. military data. Google dropped out in 2018 because of their own employees not wanting to do more defense work.
Cloud computing is a more secure and flexible way of protecting your data opposed to keeping all your company’s sensitive information in your own data center behind a firewall. The Department of Defense taking the steps to secure all their military data in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud systems not only helps Microsoft’s reputation but it also legitimizes cloud networking.
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