Treasury looks to expand its departmentwide commercial AWS cloud

The Treasury Department is looking to grow its departmentwide commercial cloud environment, which currently resides in Amazon Web Services‘ commercial infrastructure.

The department issued a sources-sought notice Wednesday asking AWS vendors to submit information on their ability to provide cloud services to Treasury bureaus and agencies through the Workplace Community Cloud (WC2).

The eventual five-year procurement could be worth up to $200 million, according to a Treasury cloud road map released last fall.

WC2 is Treasury’s cloud infrastructure built by the Office of the CIO “specifically for shared services” and resources used across the department. Currently, the environment resides in Amazon’s FISMA high and moderate enclaves, with a third-party contractor providing AWS products and services, according to procurement documents.

The department intends to expand WC2 to Microsoft‘s cloud infrastructure in the future as well.

For now, Treasury wants to scale its use of AWS under WC2, expecting an increase in demand across the department, according to a statement of objectives.

By working as a single buyer, Treasury hopes to drive “Department-wide efficiencies in terms of access, scale, contracting, and security,” the procurement documents say. “Treasury seeks to leverage its combined buying power to achieve greater economies of scale, resulting in more efficient IT infrastructure spend than Bureaus may independently be able to achieve.” As it stands currently, bureaus are approaching the move to the cloud on their own, which often comes with higher costs and can duplicate work and services.

This eventual acquisition is just one piece of Treasury’s larger cloud roadmap, which all together equates to more than $1.5 billion. Most of that includes what’s being called the T-Cloud, which is worth more than $1 billion itself. T-Cloud will support a multi-cloud environment and centralized management of infrastructure-, platform-, and software-as-a-service by a single broker. In addition to full suites of AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle cloud services, the contract will include the ability to onramp new CSPs.