Microsoft Cloud service package attracts attention of intelligence agencies outside US

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Microsoft Cloud service package attracts attention of intelligence agencies outside US

Microsoft may even announce a cloud Contract effort designed for governments outside the US later this year

Saturday August 22, 2020 3:01 PM, IANS

San Francisco: After winning a $10 billion Cloud computing contract from the US Department of Defence, Microsoft is now signing deals with governments in other countries for similar offerings, the media reported.

The kind of Cloud service package that Microsoft is offering the US Department of Defence for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, has now attracted the attention of intelligence agencies and militaries outside the US as well, reports CNBC.

Microsoft may even announce a cloud Contract effort designed for governments outside the US later this year, said the report on Friday which cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Amazon Protest

Microsoft started pushing such offerings to foregin governments apparently after the JEDI contract came to a halt after Amazon protested.

Amazon was thought to be the favourite to win the contract, but Microsoft won the Pentagon contract, worth $10 billion over 10 years.

The US Department of Defence said that the JEDI Cloud contract will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support its business and mission operations.

'Political Interference'

Amazon has accused that it lost the lucrative contract due to bias and political interference, while Microsoft has said that it won the JEDI contract because the US Department of Defense found that it offered "significantly superior" technology at a better price.

Microsoft's plan to offer similar Cloud service to governments outside the US shows that it expects to keep widening its Cloud infrastructure business even as it engages the Donald Trump administration to purchase a part of TikTok's business owned by Chinese unicorn ByteDance.

While Microsoft did not comment directly on the report, a spokesperson told CNBC that the company "worked with governments around the world on a longstanding and reliable basis for four decades."

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