The Pentagon has a cloud problem, and it isn’t capacity.
Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity in March 2026, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies was direct about the gap in the current Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program, commenting “Is it the best way to see the spend? It is not.”
That candid admission from the DoD’s top technology official signals something important for every government agency and contractor navigating today’s multi-cloud environment. The challenge lies in understanding exactly where the cloud investment is going, and what it’s actually delivering.
JWCC Next and the Push for Financial Transparency
Awarded in 2022 to Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, the original JWCC contract established a 10-year, $9 billion vehicle for cloud computing, storage, and services across the department. More than $3 billion in task orders have been issued. But as the Pentagon prepares to replace it with JWCC Next (with a solicitation expected in 2026 and contract awards planned for 2027), financial visibility has emerged as a top priority.
JWCC Next is designed to function as a unified cloud marketplace where Pentagon users can directly browse, acquire, and deploy pre-approved cloud tools from an expanded pool of providers. Critically, the program will also embed automated financial operations and multi-cloud management capabilities, giving officials far greater control over costs across the department’s sprawling cloud footprint.
Davies told lawmakers that the new program will give DISA Director Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton and his team better visibility into all cloud compute, not just for financial reasons, but for asset identification and security as well. Financial transparency and operational security, it turns out, are two sides of the same coin.
A Challenge Bigger Than the Pentagon
The DoD’s reckoning with cloud financial visibility isn’t unique. Across government and industry, organizations that have embraced hybrid and multi-cloud environments are discovering that the flexibility cloud provides comes with a significant management burden.
Applications deploy faster. New workloads spin up continuously. Multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud) support different mission requirements, each with its own pricing model, reporting structure, and billing cadence. Without a centralized approach, understanding how resources are actually being consumed becomes genuinely difficult.
The result is a visibility gap that manifests in predictable ways, such as
- Unexpected cost increases
- Difficulty allocating expenses across programs and departments
- Idle or underused resources quietly inflating bills
- Limited forecasting capability
- Fragmented reporting across providers
Critically, this is endemic across the federal sector; where limited accountability for routine cloud cleanup allows waste to compound quietly, often for years.
FinOps is About More Than Cutting Costs
FinOps, or Cloud Financial Operations, is often framed as a cost-reduction initiative. That framing undersells it.
Modern FinOps is built around a structured maturity model, a “crawl, walk, run” progression that guides organizations from foundational visibility toward increasingly strategic cloud financial management. It balances three objectives:
- Efficiency – ensuring resources are actually used effectively
- Agility – preserving the speed and flexibility that make cloud valuable in the first place
- Business value – connecting technology spending to mission outcomes
Done well, FinOps breaks down the silos between finance, operations, engineering, and leadership. Rather than each group working from its own data, stakeholders share common metrics and common objectives. The conversation shifts from “how do we spend less?” to “how do we spend smarter?”
In a government context, that means technology investments should demonstrate responsible stewardship of public resources, not just technical performance.
How Arctic IT Government Solutions Delivers Results with FinOps
Arctic IT Government Solutions (AITGS) brings a proven, structured approach to federal FinOps, grounded in real-world results and built on a powerful combination of the FinOps framework, Microsoft Azure’s native cost management tools, Microsoft Power BI for reporting and visualization, and Microsoft Dynamics for financial tracking and accountability.
The impact of this approach is on record. In a recent federal engagement, Arctic IT conducted a comprehensive review of a federal agency’s Azure cloud environment and uncovered years of accumulated waste:
- Virtual machines that had been deallocated but never removed
- Legacy storage remnants from a disk conversion
- Improperly configured backup settings retaining 180 days of full backups when only 30 days were needed
- Agency accounts that had gone completely unused for seven years
Despite the presence of Azure Advisor, these inefficiencies had gone undetected. The reason is all too common across the federal sector. Without a dedicated FinOps practice and clear accountability structures, cloud environments grow faster than they’re cleaned up.
Working collaboratively with the agency and applying the crawl phase of the FinOps framework, AITGS’s team systematically identified and eliminated the highest-impact sources of waste. The outcome was an annualized Azure cost reduction of 29.2%, a combination of cost avoidance and rate optimization that freed up meaningful resources for mission-aligned priorities.
Equally important, the engagement didn’t end there. Arctic IT Government Solutions (AITGS) delivers ongoing monthly reporting that continues to surface new cost-saving opportunities as the agency’s cloud environment evolves. That continuous visibility is what separates a one-time audit from a sustainable FinOps practice.
What This Means for Agencies Planning for JWCC Next
As the DoD moves toward embedding automated financial operations into JWCC Next, federal agencies that have already built internal FinOps capabilities will be far better positioned to take advantage of the new program’s expanded oversight tools. Those that haven’t may find themselves managing a larger, more complex cloud marketplace with the same visibility gaps that exist today.
AITGS helps agencies get ahead of that curve by establishing the processes, reporting infrastructure, and governance frameworks needed to manage cloud spend with confidence, regardless of which providers or contract vehicles are in play. If you’re ready to transform your cloud spending into cloud intelligence, connect with us today to learn how we can work together.
By Michael Sellers, Account Executive at Arctic IT Government Solutions