After nearly a year of deliberation, the Department of Homeland Security in the coming months is planning to conduct additional outreach to industry for planned contracts for data center and cloud optimization support services, with the procurement focused in the areas of support for one of the existing data centers, help with cloud migration, and the purchase of cloud services.
A draft scope of the work is expected to be issued on Feb. 7 followed by an Industry Day in March, followed by a draft requirements document and evaluation factors in April, the DHS Office of the Chief Procurement Officer and Office of the Chief Information Officer said in a Jan. 9 letter to industry published in the federal government’s business opportunities website beta.sam.gov.
Industry comments will also be due in April and a draft Request for Proposals is expected to be issued in May, according to the notional schedule contained in the letter.
The letter follows a Request for Information in February 2019 by DHS that the department was planning to modernize its legacy information technology systems, migrate to the cloud, and optimize its data center operations. It said then that at the end of 2018, DHS was already transitioning or had transitioned more than 25 percent of its IT application systems to the cloud and was planning to expand its cloud presence in 2019 and 2020.
DHS also said at the time it would implement a hybrid IT, multi-cloud, federated and vendor-neutral approach for its $6.8 billion IT portfolio.
Responses to last year’s RFI led to DHS creating the Data Center and Cloud Optimization Support Services effort, which will be procured through the EAGLE Next Generation Program contract vehicle.
“This acquisition has three focus areas,” DHS said in the Jan. 9 posting. “First, the acquisition is designed to continue and optimize the services currently being purchased in a government owned-contractor operated data center located in Stennis, MS, called Date Center 1 (DC1). In addition to these data center services in DC1, this acquisition will allow for the purchase of professional services to assist with migrating infrastructure and applications from existing DHS data centers to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) or colocation sites. Finally, this acquisition will allow for the purchase and lifecycle management of both cloud and colocation services.”
DHS owns two data centers, with General Dynamics [GD] operating DC1 and Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE] managing DC2. Both contracts expire this June.