$10 Billion Cloud Storage Contract at US Department of Interior

The contracts are in the form of ten individual indefinite delivery indefinite
quantity (IDIQ) contracts. Each individual contract has a total cap of $1
billion dollars, so the total value of all ten contracts may be as much as $10
billion. Individual projects will be awarded via task orders, one for each
project, following a one-off competition for the project between the ten
selected vendors. All of the vendors have gone through an extensive process to
gain their position as a contractor for this project. By doing it this way,
Interior hopes to ensure the most competitive prices throughout the life of the
contract.

The approach we’ve chosen also allows us to speed up our acquisition process,
which in turn allows us to leverage this technology more quickly. We can now
make our data and applications more accessible to the public and to DOI
employees across the country. We’ll also be able to provide a wider variety of
services, security solutions, and support than we currently do.

This is a change we’ve been eager to make for a while. The cloud hosting award
was on hold until recently, when a contract protest was dismissed by the US
Court of Federal Claims. Now that we can finally move forward with these
contracts, we’re expecting significant reductions in hardware, software, and
operations costs to the taxpayer.

Our first project under these contracts is for SAP application hosting.
Additional services will include VMs, storage, database hosting, secure file
transfers, Web hosting, as well as development and test environments. These
contracts will not only allow us to move these apps to the cloud, but move them
in a well-planned, methodical way.

We believe that having ready access to cloud hosting services like these will
allow us to begin the process of closing or consolidating potentially hundreds
of DOI data centers currently in use. Our hosting environment, which currently
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 CIO.