Google bypasses Microsoft with email for the US military
The US military has begun rolling out Google's collaboration suite to more than 180,000 military personnel. All the details
The US Army uses Google Mail.
The US Army has begun rolling out Google Workspace, the software giant's collaboration suite, to more than 180,000 employees, C4ISRNET and Defense News reported.
The count, which is only expected to grow, comes three months after it began publicly distributing it to troops, Google announced in a blog post in October.
The US military has turned to the Mountain View-based tech giant in the wake of email licensing shortcomings and other information technology dilemmas, the outlet said.
Specifically, the US military has considered the Google platform as a flagship option for serving troops who have lost access to official email accounts due to an inconsistent change from Defense Enterprise Email and its mail.mil addresses to Army 365 system, which covers Microsoft products.
And it is not the first time that the two tech giants have found themselves competing for defense contracts.
In late 2022, the Pentagon split the $9 billion cloud computing contract between tech giants Google, Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft after canceling the previous Jedi contract (exclusively awarded to the Redmond giant).
All the details.
WHY THE US ARMY TURNED TO THE MOUNTAIN VIEW GIANT
As the report explains, when the US Army Mail Service switched to Army 365, it switched to an individual licensing model. However, the military soon found that there would not be enough Microsoft licenses to cover all personnel. Officials initially considered giving up junior staff official access to e-mail, after which an "alternative e-mail solution" was opted for.
GOOGLE WORKSPACE HAS BEEN QUALIFIED TO USE THE ARMY
The solution for the US Army came with the qualifications obtained by Big G for Defense. Last July, Google announced that its Workspace package had obtained IL4 clearance, a security requirement related to the management of critical infrastructure, defense, intelligence, finance and proprietary corporate information. It had previously obtained FedRAMP High authorization.
Those qualifications created the path for Army usage; Google said so in an October blog post that also revealed 250,000 users would receive the credentials. Workspace was previously adopted by the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force Research Laboratory, among other federal entities.
THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN THE US ARMY AND GOOGLE PUBLIC SECTOR
Last October, Google Cloud announced the US military's new partnership with Google Public Sector that will provide 250,000 soldiers with Google Workspace, after Google obtained IL4 (Impact Level 4) clearance from the Department of Defense (DoD).
“The government has called for a greater choice of cloud service providers that can support its missions,” the company said, “and Google Workspace will equip today's military with a leading suite of collaboration tools to get the job done. ”.
COMPETITION WITH MICROSOFT
While the partial adoption of Workspace represents a new front among the tech giants in their war for Defense Department dollars.
And in the end, the Pentagon did not disappoint any big tech on the cloud. The US Department of Defense has split a $9 billion contract for cloud computing services between Google, Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). Jwcc is the multi-cloud successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi) IT modernization project to build a large common commercial cloud for the DoD.
In 2020, the Pentagon said it would reevaluate its decision to award the deal to Microsoft. And he formally canceled his Jedi contract last year, starting afresh with a new race as part of the JWCC. "While the Trump administration wanted to concentrate the cloud computing program under one vendor, Joe Biden's administration chose to split it into multiple groups as many private sector companies do," notes the Financial Times .
This time, the idea is to rely on multiple public clouds, rather than just one, as the previous Jedi project envisioned. Same choice also for e-mail.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/google-scavalca-microsoft-con-la-mail-per-esercito-usa/ on Wed, 18 Jan 2023 07:53:36 +0000.