The Department of Homeland Security last week awarded Perspecta [PRSP] a potential $112 million contract to continue to provide contractor owned and operated data storage and management services to one of the department’s data centers while it is being retired.
Perspecta is the incumbent on the contract, which it won in 2015. The new award, announced last Friday on the government’s procurement website, has a two-year base period and two six-month options and kicks in later this month.
In February, DHS said it planned to award Perspecta the contract for the continued services in support of the department’s plan to migrate or retire every system and application within Data Center 2 (DC2). The Department on Friday said that as systems are migrated or retired from the center, costs are expected to decline.
The award for continued services for DC2 will allow DHS time to conduct a competition for service at its Data Center 1, which will host many of the systems that migrate from DC2. DHS this summer plans to solicit for a competitive Data Center and Cloud Optimization procurement, which will provide data center services, cloud services, and co-location services.
General Dynamics [GD] operates DC1.
DHS decided in May 2018 to retire DC2 in two years, but the migration of systems out of the center “has proved to be more complicated than expected,” the department said in the contract notice on Friday. Systems that aren’t being retired are being migrated to the cloud or another data center.
DHS also said that the migration of data at rest has also been more “complicated and costly than expected.”
“Simply put, given the breadth of services currently being provided in DC2, there is not sufficient time to exit by June 2020 without service disruptions,” DHS said in justifying the new award to Perspecta.
So far, 41 of 153 systems in the data center have been decommissioned or retired.