Beyond JEDI, government cloud opportunities globally will abound for Microsoft, competitors

At the end of 2019, Microsoft stunned the market by winning the lucrative $10 billion JEDI contract from the US Department of Defense, snatching the opportunity away from perceived frontrunner AWS.

Plenty of opportunities remain for Microsoft to expand Azure's footprint among US federal agencies and potentially also state and local governments. But some of the biggest opportunities may now lie abroad by pursuing other national government cloud projects.

Making the pitch to government purchasers

In some ways, Microsoft has a longer heritage of working with governments than its two largest competitors—Amazon and Google Cloud. That's because many governments have adopted Office products as a de facto standard for word processing and managing spreadsheets, some even decades ago. Oracle, which emerged from a bid on a US Central Intelligence Agency database contract in the late 1970s, also has a long history of working with governments, but is a much smaller cloud-player.

Dan Stroman, senior director of Public Sector at CloudCheckr sees Microsoft's strength in its ability to offer the broadest range of services to government customers in need of answers: