The Interior Department has awarded a set of 10 individual indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contracts to accelerate its move to the cloud.
The first project is for SAP application hosting, according to the agency. Additional services will include virtual machines, storage, database hosting, secure file transfers and Web hosting, as well as development and test environments. These contracts will not only move these apps to the cloud but move them in a well-planned, methodical way, said Andrew Jackson, deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services at Interior.
The individual projects will be awarded via task orders, one for each project, following a one-off competition for the project between the 10 selected vendors: Aquilent, AT&T, Autonomic Resources, CGI, GTRI, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Smartronix, Unisys and Verizon.
An early cloud adopter, Interior experimented with adopting the application service provider model for managing its Freedom of Information Act requests in 2001 and in May 2012 the agency consolidated all its email services into a single cloud-based system using Google Apps for Government.
The new cloud hosting services will allow the agency to begin closing or consolidating hundreds of DOI data centers, Jackson said. The current hosting environment, which focuses on managing servers in-house, will be able to “transition to a modern cloud-based environment, supporting the 25-point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and the Cloud-First Policy outlined by the federal chief information officer,” he added.
