Oracle’s cloud network gains top secret approval with intelligence agencies

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure network has secured accreditation from the nation’s intelligence agencies to handle classified data, executives said in a statement Tuesday. 

By securing an authority to operate Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the company can now offer the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies collectively known as the Intelligence Community a range of cloud services on its networks.

Those services will be hosted on Oracle National Security Regions, highly secured cloud network operations centers maintained by the company and only connected to classified U.S. government networks.

The Defense Department previously granted Oracle authority to operate certification to handle the Air Force’s TS/SCI and Special Access Program missions in February 2022.

“As an established partner to the IC and DOD, Oracle is proud to bring our next generation cloud services to bear against their most important work,” said Kim Lynch, Oracle ‘s executive vice president of government defense and intelligence, in a statement. “This latest authorization reinforces our commitment to accelerating our nation’s decision advantage to protect and advance our country.”

The Austin, Texas-based software company is among the awardees on two massive enterprise cloud contracts related to national security: the Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise.

Both are indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts that allow Oracle to compete for task orders for cloud services with other awardees including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google, with the C2E contract also including IBM.

By securing an ATO with the Intelligence Community, the company can offer more services to compete for those task orders, as well as offer services to other IC agencies. Oracle currently plans to offer 50 cloud services and will add others through the continuous accreditation process, according to a company statement 

Oracle’s ability to obtain clearance to host top secret data on its cloud networks was previously at the center of its failed effort to protest the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, the forerunner to the JWCC that was ultimately canceled by the DOD after a lengthy court battle with AWS. 

Oracle was initially disqualified from competing for the $10 billion enterprise contract because the solicitation called for a single vendor with facilities that could host, store and analyze classified secret and top secret data, a requirement the company did not meet in 2018.