DHS cloud migration RFP may arrive this fall under EAGLE NextGen
The Department of Homeland Security is analyzing industry responses to its recent cloud migration request for information, a process that should run through the summer and could result in a request for proposals under a new IT contract vehicle as soon as the fall.
That solicitation is set to be released under DHS’s EAGLE NextGen contract portfolio — which it launched in February to replace the $22 billion EAGLE II as the department’s primary vehicle for acquiring IT. EAGLE II will expire in September 2020.
Speaking Tuesday at an ACT-IAC event, DHS officials said there’s no set timeline for the EAGLE NextGen family of RFPs as they read through more than 100 vendor responses to better understand the marketplace.
Kshemendra Paul, cloud action officer for the DHS CIO, told FedScoop after the event that the department remains on the “front end” of its analysis and isn’t ready to share findings or make decisions.
“Decisions about how do we see ourselves as a future state organization, what’s our service delivery and operations model, what’s the degree of insourcing versus outsourcing,” Paul said. “We’re looking at it from two dimensions. No. 1 is: What’s industry telling us through these RFIs? And second, what are we learning from the early adopters across the [DHS] components and at headquarters?”
DHS is committed to multiple cloud models but needs a pathway from private to commercial cloud. Already 10 percent of DHS’s IT portfolio is in the cloud with 44 percent in motion, Paul said.
Ultimately, the timeline for EAGLE NextGen will be driven by the procurements — like data center optimization — that are placed under the portfolio, said Soraya Correa, chief procurement officer at DHS.
DHS will work to get vendors “as much information as early as possible” on EAGLE NextGen procurements via FedBizOpps, RFIs and draft solicitation documents, Correa said.
“No procurement on my watch will take three years if I can help it,” she added.
The EAGLE NextGen portfolio currently includes five “best-in-class” contract vehicles: Alliant 2, 8(a) STARS II, VETS 2, and the National Institutes of Health’s CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business. Alliant 2 Small Business was initially included but is currently offline.
Complementary to that, DHS will establish departmentwide, strategically sourced contract vehicles to meet particular mission needs, said Jaclyn Rubino, executive director of shared services and governmentwide security category manager at DHS.
“Instead of trying to carve out requirements within the [best-in-class contracts], we want to establish the consistency but also compete the requirements based on depth of capabilities to ensure we have a vendor pool that knows DHS, knows our infrastructure,” Rubino said.
