> The AWS Top Secret Region was launched three years ago as the first air-gapped commercial cloud and customers across the U.S. Intelligence Community have made it a resounding success.
AWS has provided air-gapped regions to the US Government for 6+ years, according to that blog post.
But presumably Internet connectivity is the entire point of why they'd want a cloud contract: The government already has servers in buildings. It sounds like they particularly want the global reach of a cloud service, probably for activities intentionally intended to be on the Internet.
I mean, bear in mind, if you're a state-level actor that engages in cyberattacks, you need to be on the Internet to do them... Not saying that's the purpose of the JEDI contract, just that... there's plenty of scenarios where the military wants Internet-connected things.
On the other hand, let's be honest... In strategy for a modern war, Microsoft and Amazon's major datacenters are already on someone's priority target list.
Every nation-state actor knows where every datacenter is of every major digital player, because they've already implanted spies in those companies and the location maps of those datacenters are not internally secret. It'd be very hard to make them internally secret, since those DCs communicate with the rest of the network and must be controlled in realtime by site reliability engineers.
The DoD's job is defense, so it's about fighting wars, not about building infrastructure and supplies.
The security of the military apparatus will stay in the DoD. The implementation and operation of the security infrastructure will be delivered by government contract.