GSA developing governmentwide cloud acquisition strategy
The General Services Administration is developing a governmentwide cloud acquisition strategy and wants feedback from cloud service providers and other industry partners.
GSA‘s plan is to deliver a multiple-award blanket purchase agreement (BPA) for Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings on a pay-as-you-go basis. New innovations, dubbed Anything-as-a-Service, may be considered for future procurement vehicles.
The request for information (RFI) comes a day after President Biden issued a long-awaited cybersecurity executive order requiring federal agencies to develop zero-trust security architecture implementation plans making use of secure cloud services.
“The IT environments in which the government operates are changing and evolving at a rapid pace, driving GSA to leverage the Multiple Award Schedule Cloud [Special Item Number] to develop an easy-to-use, government-wide acquisition solution for cloud services in a hybrid model,” said Keith Nakasone, deputy assistant commissioner of IT Category at GSA, in the Thursday announcement. “The No. 1 thing agencies ask for is an acquisition solution that offers a full set of commercial, secure, soup-to-nuts cloud products and services. We think now is the right time to make it happen.”
Agencies would use the proposed BPA to replace legacy IT products and services with secure cloud ones, with market research showing a multiple-award BPA to be the best approach for procuring existing offerings.
Pandemic remote work has seen agencies alter their IT environments, embrace zero-trust security and seek more cloud offerings, so GSA wants to develop a solution set for federal, state, local and tribal governments.
The cloud acquisition strategy will be rooted in the Cloud Smart strategy and President’s Management Agenda IT modernization goals.
Industry has until May 24 to complete the survey on the RFI.
