Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been awarded a contract for a "zero trust pilot" virtual private cloud project by the US Department of Defense (DoD).

An award notice published on SAM.gov on October 7 gives the contract a total value of close to $7.2 million.

The contract is expected to have a base period of 12 months and four further 12-month extension option periods.

In a document attached to the award notice, the project is described as a "Zero Trust Pilot project to re-engineer Pentagon Force Protection Agency’s (PFPA) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment to meet the DoD CIO’s Trust Activities (Target & Advanced Levels) as outlined in the DoD Zero Trust Strategy."

The document adds that the outcome of the pilot will set the standard architecture, network protocols, and associated licenses for the PFPA and other DoD agencies looking to migrate their AWS cloud systems to a DoD Zero Trust-compliant architecture.

As part of the project, the Meteorological Modeling System software - designed to only run on AWS - will be used as the test software "due to its use of compute resources that span multiple cloud impact levels."

The DoD adds that AWS "is the only vendor that can complete this Zero Trust Pilot" because the PFPA solely uses AWS as its cloud computing provider.

The document notes: "The DoD CIO needs a system already hosted in AWS to perform the work necessary to ensure the supporting network architecture can be transformed into a Zero Trust compliant landing zone capable of supporting a High-Performance Compute (HPC) environment."

The contract has been awarded under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract vehicle.

According to the document, the PFPA is also currently researching other "cloud-based hazard prediction modeling system[s]" that could be hosted by other cloud service providers, noting that a quote from MIT Lincoln Labs was for $5 million and would span over three years.

Amazon won a contract earlier this year to develop a data center and cloud system with the Australian Government to handle top-secret information from agencies including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. The Australian government is set to invest AU$2 billion (US$1.3 billion) in the new system over the next ten years.