Amid a showdown over a controversial $10 billion cloud computing contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, Microsoft Corp. has scored a strategic victory against the other contenders.

The company announced on Wednesday that it has landed a six-year cloud deal with the intelligence community “worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.” The deal was awarded by a body known as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The office is tasked with overseeing the CIA, NSA and parts of several other agencies. Overall, a total of 17 different agencies are covered under the new cloud deal.

The agreement expands an existing contract among Microsoft, Dell Technologies Inc. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to include more products. Chief among these offerings is Azure Government. It’s a version of the company’s cloud platform that is specifically geared toward the public sector and runs in dedicated data centers not used by any commercial customers.

On top of providing separate infrastructure, Azure Government has also been cleared by several of the cybersecurity assessment programs that the government uses to evaluate technology products. Other Microsoft products such as Office 365 boast similar public-sector credentials. 

Mostly recently, the company introduced a special edition of Azure Stack approved for government customers. Azure Stack is a software platform that ships with appliances sold by Microsoft partners such as Dell and enables organizations to replicate its cloud platform in their data centers. Overall, the company claimed, its products are used by some 10 million government users.

Yet despite Microsoft’s strong presence in the public sector, it’s Amazon Web Services Inc. that is seen as the front runner to win the DoD’s $10 billion contract. Microsoft and other competing players such as Oracle Corp. have raised concerns that the department may be showing favoritism toward AWS. The group is pushing for a number of changes, most notably that the project be split up among multiple providers.

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