Google Cloud has announced that it has secured a deal with the United States Department of Defense to help detect and respond to cyber threats.
This deal will allow the Defense Innovation Unit to run applications across platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud while being managed through the Google Cloud Console.
Google had previously dropped out of the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract battle citing it was in conflict with its AI principles. But, the new seven-figure contract with DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is a huge win for the cloud unit and CEO Thomas Kurian.
The new contract involves Anthos, the tool announced by the company for securing DIU’s multi-cloud environment. The DoD has always made use of solutions from all three major cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — and this solution will be providing a way for monitoring security across all three environments.
“Multi-cloud is the future. The majority of commercial businesses run multi-cloud environments securely and seamlessly, and this is now coming to the federal government as well,” Mike Daniels, VP of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud. The primary idea is to effortlessly manage security across all three environments with help from Netskope, a cloud security vendor. “The multi-cloud solution will be built on Anthos, allowing DIU to run web services and applications across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure — while being centrally managed from the Google Cloud Console,” the company wrote in a statement.
Daniels added, “This is a contract with the DIU, but our expectation is that the DoD will look at the project as a model for how to implement their own security posture.”
In the past, Google had made a bid for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the defense department that was ultimately awarded to Microsoft Corp.
