Navy awards Microsoft sole-source cloud contract, admits vendor lock-in risk
Gettyimages.com/Anton Petrus
By
Nick Wakeman
The Naval Sea Systems Command believes switching cloud providers would require a "re-engineering" of the solution from the ground up.
The Naval Sea Systems Command has awarded Microsoft a sole-source contract for cloud computing services under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program.
While the dollar value of the new three-year contract has been redacted, NAVSEA admits that it is risking vendor lock-in by sticking with Microsoft.
G2OPs, a woman-owned small business, originally won the current contract for cloud services in 2021 through a competitive process. Microsoft provided the underlying Azure services including data transfer, Kubernetes, SQL platform-as-a-service, Azure Key Vault, and Azure Monitor.
But negotiations for the final year of the contract ran into a snag because of what justification document calls “unforeseen issues.” NAVSEA has instead put in place a contract extension until Nov. 11.
“Without the use of these services, the NAVSEA Cloud Program mission systems would be unable to provide critical mission capabilities,” the command wrote in its justification document.
NAVSEA said that if it went with a different cloud service provider, “the government would need to re-engineer the solution from the ground up."
The command reached out to the other cloud providers on JWCC (Google, Amazon Web Services and Oracle) in April 2025. Those companies told NAVSEA they could not support the full cloud requirement in its current configuration or within the timeframe NAVSEA needed.
“Only Microsoft confirmed service parity with the current environment and the ability to meet mission needs without introducing unacceptable operational risk,” according to the justification document.
While Microsoft is the only choice for now, NAVSEA said it would work to overcome barriers to competition by focusing on adopting containerization standards in a way that is not tied solely to Microsoft.
Containerization packages applications along with all the supporting software they need to run, making them portable between different systems.
NAVSEA also plans to emphasize open containerization approaches, as opposed to the current use of Microsoft-native containerization.
“This evolution should allow more flexibility to shift workloads across CSPs in the future,” NAVSEA wrote.