The US Defense Department has recently announced that it would be awarded $9 billion in contracts for cloud infrastructure services in December.

Indeed, this initiative, which comes eight months later than expected, will be a new path for the US military to rely on multiple cloud providers. This strategy was first initiated by the Pentagon to use with the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract but the contract with Microsoft was canceled.

The Pentagon has said that the contracts will have a three-year base period and two-year option periods and that there will be full and open competition for a future multi-cloud acquisition. The new initiative will then span five years and have a large dollar amount over 10 years.