FAA awards $109M contract to cloud rivals
The Federal Aviation Administration signed off on a huge cloud services contract Monday that will have two competing cloud providers working together for a change.
Microsoft and Amazon Web Services will provide cloud services on the CSC Government Solutions-led $108-million, 10-year contract. According to contractor integrator CSC, the award could be worth more than $1 billion over the 10-year period.
Despite the competition in the race to the cloud, CSC said this type of contract brings more value to the FAA and taxpaying Americans.
“CSC and our alliance partners are demonstrating the unique value that we as a team can bring to deliver an innovative, next-gen IT cloud solution that drives the FAA’s mission forward,” Mike Lawrie, CSC’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “By coming together as we have, we are in a unique position to help meet the agency’s operational and budgetary challenges over the life of the program.”
CSC said it will serve as a broker to the FAA using its CSC Agility Platform cloud management tool to provide data and cloud services from partners Microsoft and Amazon.
The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract includes data center consolidation and migration to a hybrid cloud environment with as-a-service, on-demand offerings. The FAA said this move from its investments away from physical data centers “will increase efficiencies and flexibility while saving time and money – all while making information-sharing much easier.”
The FAA said work on the project will be rolled out in phases over the next year, beginning with analyzing which systems can be relocated and then migrating them.
