Google LLC today said that it has won a contract to build a “secure cloud management solution” for protecting the U.S. Defense Department’s cloud infrastructure.

The deal is valued in the seven figures, the search giant told Axios. Google is taking on the project for the DOD’s Digital Innovation Unit, which is in charge of helping the Pentagon adopt emerging technologies from the private sector, and will work with cybersecurity startup Netskope Inc. to build the solution the department has commissioned.

Netskope’s software is set to power the solution’s core cloud security features. Google said that it will enable the DOD to deploy virtual firewalls and auditing systems in its cloud infrastructure, with planned capacity to cover up to a million devices and 500,000 concurrent users. The project will also deliver features for controlling access to the department’s applications.

In the announcement, Google said the overall goal is to help DOD “detect, protect against, and respond to cyber threats worldwide.” Another objective will be improving the department’s ability to accommodate employees working remotely. In particular, the project aims to support staff doing work on their mobile devices by providing “minimal latency for teleconferencing and VoIP” applications.

“Moat-based security doesn’t work, as the pandemic has shown,” said Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud. “This contract with the DIU is a strong signal that the time is now to implement ‘zero-trust’ security.”

Behind the scenes, the security solution will use the open-source Istio service mesh framework to facilitate secure communications between the DOD workloads it will protect. Google’s Anthos suite of hybrid cloud tools is set to have a role as well. The Anthos integration will enable the security solution to protect DOD workloads across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure while enabling administrators to manage operations centrally via the Google Cloud Console.

“The bigger story here is that it’s a huge win for Anthos,” Sean Feeney, Cloud Practice director at digital business consultant Nerdery, told SiliconANGLE. “Anthos was initially a big bet by Google Cloud and has become Google’s main differentiator from its competitors in the hybrid cloud space. Anthos comes into play for both the DoD’s on-premises and their multicloud systems, which will allow Google to become more embedded in the DoD’s overall architecture and a de facto part of deals the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit may ink with competitors AWS or Azure.”

More broadly, Feeney added, “This win is reflective of cloud providers’ current strategy of accelerating enterprise-level cloud adoption by getting in the door with broad-utility ‘glue’ services — developer and operations tools that are so user-friendly or productivity-improving as to be ‘sticky’ across on-premise and multi-cloud environments — with the goal of winning market share by winning grassroots mindshare.”

The DOD’s decision to award the deal to Google also provides fresh validation for its multicloud strategy, which has seen the company extend its cloud’s capabilities to rival platforms. The idea is to make customers’ workloads more easily portable across public clouds by providing a common set of management features. 

“Multicloud is the future,” Daniels said. “The majority of commercial businesses run multicloud environments securely and seamlessly, and this is now coming to the federal government as well.”

The strategy was introduced in earnest last April during Google’s annual Cloud Next conference. Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, commented at the time that “the ability to take virtual machines and move them into containers and move them anywhere — write once, move anywhere — that I think is the key differentiator right now relative to AWS and to a lesser extent Microsoft.”

Beyond showing that this multicloud approach has appeal for government customers, the DOD deal might give Google a springboard to win more cloud contracts from the department in the future. The search giant seems to be counting on that. This morning, Axios reported that Google plans to triple staffing for its public sector operation over the next few years.

“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,” Daniels said.

AWS and Microsoft, Google’s top cloud rivals, are currently engaged in a high-profile legal battle over another DOD deal. The dispute began last year when the department granted its $10 billion JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft last year even though AWS expected to be the winner. 

Photo: Google