Google wins seven-figure DoD contract

Specific contract award amount was not disclosed

Published May 21, 2020 by Sydney Lake

Google Cloud, a division of Google LLC, announced Thursday that it’s been awarded a seven-figure Department of Defense contract to provide multi-cloud management.

A specific contract award amount was not disclosed.

The contract will be completed for the DoD’s Innovation Unit (DIU), which works to scale commercial technology across the agency. Google Cloud will build a multi-cloud solution on Anthos, which will allow the DIU to run web services and applications on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The DIU will then be able to monitor networks in real time, control access and see full audit trails for cloud security purposes.

“Google Cloud is a pioneer in ‘zero trust’ security and in deploying innovative approaches to protecting and securing networks worldwide,” said Mike Daniels, Google Cloud’s Reston-based vice president, global public sector, in a statement. “We’re honored to partner with DIU on this critical initiative to protect its network from bad actors that pose threats to our national security.”

Just last year, however, Google dropped its bid for another $10 billion DoD contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, because it competed with its corporate values on how artificial intelligence should be used. The JEDI contract was awarded to Microsoft in late 2019, which will build out AI and cloud infrastructure for the Pentagon.

Google later published its AI values, which included that it would not design or deploy AI for weapons, surveillance or other tech designed principally to injure people.