Cloud | The Contracting Education Academy

August 14, 2019 By AMK

New HHS contract writing system testing more than an innovative technology approach

In early fiscal 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services will pilot its new contracting writing system called Accelerate.

HHS will work with a small group of contracting officers and industry to prove that using the cloud and blockchain technology is not only possible, but real.

Jose Arrieta, who is currently the chief information officer and was the acting deputy assistant secretary for grants, acquisition policy and accountability at HHS, said the agency has made a lot of progress since December when the Accelerate platform received the authority to operate.

The grants, acquisition policy and accountability office has been testing the ability of the system to take in actual data from the five contract writing systems HHS uses as well as the analytics for prices paid and terms and conditions and refining the microservices that they built to better communicate with program managers.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/ask-the-cio/2019/07/hhs-new-contract-writing-system-testing-more-than-an-innovative-technology-approach/

July 11, 2019 By AMK

DISA, DSS award second OTA to build governmentwide security clearance system

Defense officials said Tuesday that they had awarded a $75 million other transaction agreement to build major components of the IT system that will eventually handle all background investigations and security clearance adjudications for federal employees and contractors.

The award went to a team of vendors led by Perspecta, the same large government contractor that won a separate $49 million OTA last year to build another portion of the National Background Investigation System (NBIS).

The new agreement is specifically meant to build the security architecture and data services for NBIS. Officials decided it was needed after lessons learned from the first OTA, which focused primarily on building investigation management tools.

“We’ve had pieces of the NBIS application running at other DoD agency data centers and being built by other partners, independent of this common enterprise architecture,” said Terry Carpenter, the program executive officer for NBIS. “What we’re figuring out is by building out a common data broker, we can get an even greater efficiency. This is a federal-wide service that has to be up 365 days a year, 24 by seven. And to assure that type of robustness, we really wanted to make sure we were taking advantage of the cloud architecture to make sure that the application has those kinds of properties: Self-healing, self-aware, can expand with the demand. And all of those pieces are in this new OTA.”

Keep reading article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/nbib-transfer-to-dod/2019/05/disa-dss-award-second-ota-to-build-governmentwide-security-clearance-system/

May 6, 2019 By AMK

Despite the ‘potential ethical violations,’ JEDI contract moves forward

In the wake of an ethics investigation, Pentagon officials have selected two cloud service providers to move forward as potential candidates in the Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative cloud services contract.

The selection of those providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, came after an Oracle lawsuit challenging the legality of the JEDI contract process was put on hold in February to allow DoD to investigate previously unknown information about conflicts of interest.

“The department’s investigation has determined that there is no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process,” DoD spokesperson Elissa Smith in a statement.

“However, the investigation also uncovered potential ethical violations, which have been further referred to DoD [inspector general]. There are two different components of the investigation. First, DoD investigated potential conflicts of interest as they relate to the acquisition process. This portion of the investigation determined that there are no conflicts of interest that affected the integrity of the acquisition process. However, there may be potential ethical violations, which have been referred to DoD IG for further investigation.”

Keep reading article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2019/04/11/despite-the-potential-ethical-violations-jedi-moves-forward/

May 2, 2019 By AMK

CIA considering cloud contract worth ‘tens of billions’

After six years in a classified commercial cloud built by Amazon Web Services, the CIA wants more commercial cloud capabilities from potentially multiple companies.

The agency is in the early stages of planning a contract for commercial cloud computing services that will be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents presented to select tech companies by the CIA in late March and obtained by Nextgov.

Dubbed the Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, the two-phase initiative will “expand and enhance” the commercial cloud capabilities it first contracted for with Amazon Web Services in 2013.

That contract, called C2S and valued at up to $600 million over 10 years, provided commercial cloud capabilities such as data storage, computing and analytics to the CIA and its 16 sister agencies within the intelligence community.

“Since that time, cloud computing has proven transformational for the IC–increasing the speed at which new applications can be developed to support mission and improving the functionality and security of those applications,” the CIA contracting documents state.

Whereas C2S has been managed by a single company, the CIA expects to “acquire foundational cloud services” from multiple vendors in phase one of C2E, which is good news for companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google and others expected to compete for the contract.

Keep reading article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/04/cia-considering-cloud-contract-worth-tens-billions/156222

In early fiscal 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services will pilot its new contracting writing system called Accelerate.

Defense officials said Tuesday that they had awarded a $75 million other transaction agreement to build major components of the IT system that will eventually handle all background investigations and security clearance adjudications for federal employees and contractors.

In the wake of an ethics investigation, Pentagon officials have selected two cloud service providers to move forward as potential candidates in the Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative cloud services contract.

After six years in a classified commercial cloud built by Amazon Web Services, the CIA wants more commercial cloud capabilities from potentially multiple companies.

Efforts by the General Services Administration to protect data gathered by its building lease support services providers got tangled in internal contracting rules, according to an inspector general report.

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