The Loser Nobody Names: Legacy Cloud Competitors Get Squeezed by FedRAMP and JWCC
The federal government doesn't pick cloud vendors on price or performance alone — it picks them on paperwork. FedRAMP High authorization can take 18-24 months and cost a vendor seven figures before a single agency signs a contract. The Pentagon's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), a multi-award vehicle worth up to $9 billion, narrowed the field even further: only four companies cleared the bar in 2022. That compliance moat is the mechanism — it doesn't just reward the biggest hyperscalers, it makes it structurally irrational for federal agencies to buy from anyone else, freezing out regional integrators and single-cloud GovCloud specialists who can't amortize the authorization cost across a large enough customer base.