The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency Monday said it awarded a cloud computing contract that’s potentially worth almost a half-billion dollars to a relatively unknown provider called CSRA Inc.

CSRA describes itself as a pure-play government information technology vendor that was formed through the merger of Computer Science Corp.’s North American public sector unit and government contractor SRA International back in 2015.

The new contract will see CSRA deploy and operate a government cloud in DoD data centers. DISA said the contract will run for an initial three years with the option to extend it for five additional one-year periods. If that happens, the contract could be worth as much as $498 million over the full eight years, the DoD said.

Under the contract, CSRA will provide private cloud infrastructure based on a government cloud certification called FedRAMP, which the company achieved last year alongside Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The deal is part of an initiative called milCloud 2.0, which involves migrating DoD agency workloads to cloud infrastructure platforms so they can run a range of “highly protected workloads,” the agency said. One of the requirements of milCloud 2.0 is that companies like CSRA provide secure infrastructure capable of partitioning sensitive and classified data and delivering it in near-real time to those with the security clearance to view it.

The Pentagon said it ultimately wants to deploy a mix of secure private clouds managed by providers like CSRA to run alongside federal hybrid clouds for less sensitive workloads hosted in commercial data centers.

The entire effort is part of a larger initiative called the Joint Information Environment, which aims to deploy shared IT infrastructure with commercial-like hosting capabilities built on one security architecture. DISA said milCloud 2.0 “supports the DoD’s overall data center consolidation efforts by providing the capabilities to shift legacy applications to cloud service providers.”

The initiative also highlights how government agencies are slowly following enterprise IT practices. For example, milCloud seeks to leverage cloud scaling while reducing the costs of running infrastructure through the consolidation of virtual desktops and other IT platforms.

Image: The U.S. Army/Flickr