The General Services Administration (GSA) is seeking industry comments on a potential new Specialty Item Number (SIN) to improve access to cybersecurity and information assurance (CyberIA) contract offerings and help industry better differentiate products and services.
The week of Aug. 10, the GSA posted a request for information (RFI) to receive feedback from industry and other stakeholders on the proposed SIN and to better understand how industry partners selling CyberIA products and services support a decision. The SIN would be under IT schedule 70.
The potential new SIN is meant to help address cybersecurity breaches as well as administration and congressional reaction to the breaches. The Cyber Security Act of 2012 (S.2105) suggested the GSA administrator develop a multiple award schedule special item number under schedule 70 for information security products and services and consolidate those products and services under that special item number to promote acquisition, the request posted to FedBizOpps said.
GSA also noted the president’s FY ’16 budget request provides $14 billion to support cybersecurity efforts across the government to strengthen cyber defenses.
“GSA believes the CyberIA products and services market is sufficiently mature for this SIN to attract both vendors and government buyers,” the RFI said.
The RFI explained SIN categories include hardware, software, and services associated with information assurance, virus detection, intrusion detection and prevention, network management, situational awareness and incident response, secure web hosting, and backup and security services.
“This [potential SIN] effort would support initiatives to improve customer procurement of CyberIA offerings and enable agencies to take full advantage of CyberIA benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost,” the request said.
The GSA is specifically seeking feedback on the proposed SIN scope, whether all offerings should meet the essential characteristics of CyberIA as defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and whether the proposed SIN categories are too few or require modification.
Responses are due by Sept. 11.