Internet giant Google and its e-commerce counterpart, Amazon, appear to be the two main contenders in a tender issued by the Israeli government for the operation of a new project intended to provide cloud services for the country’s entire public sector — including the IDF.
Although US-based firms Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle participated in the bidding process, according to CTech, Microsoft is “currently not in the running.” Writing for the Hebrew-language Calcalist business news site, journalist Meir Orbach predicted the two companies to win the tender will be Amazon and Google.
One of the two winners selected will become the primary tender, with the second one being the smaller partner.
Project Nimbus is a “large-scale multi-year flagship project jointly managed by Israel’s Government Procurement Administration, the Government Computer Authority at the Ministry of Cyber and Digital Matters, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Ministry of Finance, the National Cyber Security Authority, the Budget Department, the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.”
It is intended to “provide thorough and comprehensive reference for the provision of cloud services for the Israeli government,” according to the website of the Israel Accountant General.
“The project will include a number of levels which will offer a response to create a cloud services supply channel, and to draw up government policy on the subject, migration to the cloud and modernization of services, control and optimization of activity in the cloud.”
Some of the tenders in the project have already ended. Those in the third and fourth stages of the project were rolled out only recently; of those, the biggest one is the public cloud, intended to enable Israel to provide services that will be transitioned to the cloud, or begin operating there from the start.
The Israeli government is set to invest billions of shekels in Project Nimbus.
