The Pentagon as seen from Air Force One, June 3, 2011.

The Pentagon as seen from Air Force One, June 3, 2011. Photo: Associated Press

The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded a five-year contract to REAN Cloud LLC, worth up to $950 million, in a bid to speed up its shift to the cloud, an agency spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.

REAN Cloud, an Amazon Web Services partner, provides cloud-strategy, migration and managed services to customers in highly-regulated end markets, such as life sciences, higher education, financial services and government.

Under the deal, the Herndon, Va., based firm will help Defense Department agencies shift IT workloads to the cloud by automating and accelerating key processes, enabling them to more quickly migrate legacy applications to a government-approved, commercial cloud provider, the company said.

The goal is to provide them with a streamlined process that achieves the “same efficiencies available to the commercial sector as they seek to design, migrate, automate, manage and scale systems and databases running in the cloud,” Sekhar Puli, a REAN managing partner, said in a statement.

The firm recently worked with the Pentagon on a large-scale infrastructure assessment and cloud migration for U.S. Transportation Command.

In a 2016 internal plan, aimed at speeding up cost-savings efforts to consolidate thousands of data centers, the Defense Department described its complex IT network as having “ten-thousand operational systems, hundreds of data centers, tens of thousands of servers, millions of computers and IT devices, and hundreds of thousands of commercial mobile devices.”

That same year, it was criticized by a federal watchdog for closing only 18% of some 3,115 data centers, falling short of a government-wide target of 40%.

The Defense Department has sought to develop managed cloud services and improve industry partnerships, among other initiatives.