JA Redacted

JUSTIFICATION FOR EXCEPTION TO

FAIR OPPORTUNITY OR BRAND NAME

Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)
Part 16.5 Justification & Approval (J&A)

CSS Tracking Number: 852675435
Military Interdepartmental Purchase Request: HC1085606478 Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) Contract: HC105023D0003 Procurement Title: Continuous Monitoring and Risk Scoring (CMRS) Cloud Estimated Value:
Regulatory Authority: FAR 16.507-6(b)(2)
J&A Exception to Fair Opportunity Number: JA26-071

1. REQUIRING AGENCY AND CONTRACTING ACTIVITY:

Requiring Agency: Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) / Acquisition – Portfolio Acquisition Executive Cyber (Identity)
Contracting Activity: DISA/Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization (DITCO)/Cloud Capabilities Section (PS8511)

2. NATURE/DESCRIPTION OF ACTION(S):

Type of Action: New Task Order (TO)
Type of Contract: Firm-fixed-price
This action is to issue a TO against the JWCC Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity Contract for CMRS Cloud. This TO will be issued directly to Microsoft Corporation. The anticipated period of performance (PoP) is for a 1-year base period, plus one 1-year option period.

3. DESCRIPTION OF SUPPLIES/SERVICES:

Cloud hosting environment to support the data ingestion CMRS, Endpoint Security Solutions and Innovations (ESSI) Lab, and Logs1. This will provide support to a pre-production cloud lab for CMRS and also support data collection from Microsoft Defender reporting across the Department of War.

4. IDENTIFICATION OF EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY:

FAR 16.507-6(b)(2) - Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.

5. DEMONSTRATION THAT THE PROPOSED CONTRACTOR’S UNIQUE

QUALIFICATIONS OR THE NATURE OF THE ACQUISITION REQUIRES USE OF THE

EXCEPTION CITED:

Page 1 of 5 Pages

J&A: CMRS Cloud
1. UNIQUE QUALIFICATIONS: Microsoft is the only source capable of fulfilling this requirement due to the highly specialized, proprietary technical architecture of the ESSI lab and its deep integration with Microsoft specific cloud services. The ESSI infrastructure relies heavily on specialized Microsoft Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings such as Azure Event Hubs for high throughput CMRS data ingestion and Azure Structured Querly Language for complex compliance data normalization. These offerings possess no direct 1-to-1 equivalents in other cloud environments without extensive and