Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability with Red Hat

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) is a U.S. government defense contract vehicle that will allow the Department of Defense (DoD) the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from cloud service providers. 

JWCC is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle, meaning that an indefinite quantity of supplies or services can be acquired for a fixed period. This means that U.S. warfighters can use the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition process to acquire commercial cloud services and cloud applications of all classification levels from multiple vendors, through a single JWCC marketplace.

Through the JWCC, a marketplace of applications and services from numerous software providers, including Red Hat, are available using cloud services from multiple different hyperscalers.

To protect national security and increase warfighter effectiveness, the DoD is working to become more agile, while more securely distributing workloads and data across its infrastructures. This means taking applications and data into the field where people need it to close the threat capability gap and exceed enemy capacity.

As the largest federal department in the United States, the DoD can become more competitive by modernizing legacy infrastructure and outdated processes—without compromising the security of IT systems that are critical to its missions.

The JWCC marketplace was created with the aim to give warfighters the opportunity to acquire tools from multiple vendors to aid this transition using a single contract. Specifically, the JWCC aims to give DoD contractors:

• Global accessibility
• Available and resilient services
• Ease of use
• Commercial parity
• Elastic computing, storage, and network infrastructure
• Advanced data analytics
• Fortified security
• Tactical edge devices

The DoD is aiming to fulfill these goals as a digital transformation path in order to deliver a global, resilient, and secure information environment spanning all warfighting domains. The JWCC notably replaces proposed contracts such as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract which would have set up a marketplace using only a single hyperscaler.

The unique value of the JWCC is that it allows warfighters to acquire offerings from multiple cloud service provider vendors using a single acquisition process.

However, this approach comes with challenges. When many vendor offerings are made only to work with one another, they not work optimally across vendors. When looking for partners and services through JWCC, warfighters need options that work across multiple vendors while still offering everything they require from that tool, such as data support across classification levels and the ability to enable zero-trust security solutions.

Another advantage of the JWCC is that it offers tools across hybrid cloud infrastructure under a single contract. This means that you can acquire tools specialized to work on the tactical edge, in a commercial datacenter, or on bare metal in a centralized operating base. The challenge in this regard is making sure the tools and solutions acquired all work together cohesively in an ever-changing mission environment.

Red Hat understands that the DoD faces unique challenges and must implement multi-domain operation (MDO) strategies to integrate and coordinate command and control operations simultaneously across air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.

Containers and cloud technologies play a key role in these MDOs for warfighters. However, to realize the power of these technologies, federal organizations require strict security accreditations to ensure they are operating within secure environments. Red Hat® solutions are specifically suited for working across multi-vendor environments while maintaining the requirements needed by the DoD.

Red Hat JWCC offerings are valuable for the modern warfighter for three key reasons:

1. Flexible and open support across multiple clouds and vendors

Red Hat’s core offerings, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat® OpenShift®, and Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform work the same, whether they are hosted on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud. And together, they offer tools for the challenges of the modern warfighter.

2. Tools that work on bare metal, all the way to the edge

The modern warfighter needs tools that are able to counter near-peer adversaries, and that means systems that work from the datacenter, use tactical cloud computing in the battlefield, and work at the operational edge. Red Hat solutions are designed to work and communicate with one another across the entire hybrid cloud.

3. Tools to help enforce the security required for the mission

Environments for global missions that include multiple theaters are inherently complex. Automation is required to organize and orchestrate solutions across those environments while maintaining the security requirements of the mission. Red Hat offers automation solutions that give operators the tools to fulfill these mission tasks.

Why use Red Hat Enterprise Linux via the JWCC

Red Hat Enterprise Linux extends your hybrid cloud infrastructure to the edge, scaled across hundreds—or even hundreds of thousands—of nodes all over the world. Create edge-optimized OS images, minimize workload interruptions caused by OS updates, transfer system updates more efficiently, and have confidence in automatic health checks and rollbacks.

Why use Red Hat OpenShift via the JWCC?

Red Hat OpenShift complies with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and multiple layers of federally certified security hardening, including FIPS 140-2 validated crypto and Common Criteria certified platforms. Red Hat solutions also align with the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design , an initiative that focuses on automating workflow, tools, and services to scale, as well as standards critical to the warfighter—including performance measurement capability.

Red Hat’s approach to the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design offers a comprehensive platform solution for DevSecOps to meet agency standards for security, compliance, privacy, transparency, and trust. It also provides the necessary productive abstractions for DoD organizations to focus on delivering applications rather than technical details. It can be implemented anywhere Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is deployed, including public cloud service providers, on-premise datacenters, and edge and air-gapped environments.

Why use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform via the JWCC?

The modern warfighter needs solutions that are standardized to work across vendors and operate from bare metal, across clouds, and to the edge of the network, while maintaining a high level of security. To make sure complex environments stay secure, automation is required.

Ansible Automation Platform gives you tools to make sure your systems are properly configured each time, wherever they are deployed. This starts by defining what it means for a system to be secured. Ansible roles apply the DISA STIG standard for secure systems, defining common baselines for secure machine profiles. Then monitor those systems for compliance and deviations from security standards–and automatically remediate where necessary.

Finally, Ansible Automation Platforms’s powerful, role-based access control (RBAC) engine lets you safely delegate access to playbooks, roles, and inventories while keeping a record of every action a user takes in the system ensuring a complete, and greatly simplified, audit trail.

In conclusion

Red Hat’s holistic approach to digital transformation can help the DoD not only jumpstart its  modernization efforts, but also serve as a reliable partner throughout the entire process. And as the DoD seeks technology to move to mission capability faster, and with less risk, our open hybrid cloud approach and comprehensive solutions informed by edge computing can equip the DoD to implement MDO and effectively conduct military operations across all service branches and agencies, no matter the cloud services provider being deployed. Red Hat continues to develop new capabilities and solutions for the JWCC marketplace.

Learn more about Red Hat solutions for the DoD