The Navy on Wednesday awarded CSRA, a General Dynamics [GD] Information Technology subsidiary, a $96 million contract to utilize the company’s commercial cloud services.
The one-year blanket purchase agreement (BPA) includes four potential one-year follow-up options as the Navy looks to begin implementing its multi-cloud strategy to bring in a range of vendors needed to create a computing environment capable of transferring and operating critical IT capabilities to the cloud.
“This BPA for commercial cloud services will be an important tool to accelerate Navy cloud adoption, allowing us to tap into the capabilities, processes, and skills being used in commercial industry today both for the use of our data in the cloud for improved cybersecurity and from an operational perspective,” Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, director of the Navy’s cyber security division, said in a statement. “Doing so puts us in a better position to meet warfighter needs for combating evolving threats, and creating a more lethal force by employing emerging technologies.”
The BPA, awarded through the General Services Administration’s Schedule 70 contract vehicle, will give the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems access through CSRA to major cloud platform providers, including Amazon Web Services.
“Success with our cloud approach is realized when the individual cloud brokers across the enterprise are able to deliver cloud services at speed to meet the needs of all our Navy consumers,” Ruth Youngs Lew, a PEO EIS lead officer, said in a statement. “The enterprise cloud agreement is part of a growing portfolio cloud services available to our Navy cloud brokers and their customers. This fits with our goal of accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies in order to deliver greater capacity which is critical to maintaining our technological advantage.”
The agreement allows the Navy to rapidly acquire and integrate additional cloud services as officials look to deliver improved capabilities to its five systems commands.
“The cloud model is a new one for us and we are mindful of the shared cyber security responsibility, which is different than how we manage and protect data today. We have worked very hard over the last 15 months to ensure we have mechanisms in place to properly execute the command and control functions of our information in the cloud, and we will learn more as we progress,” Barrett said.
CSRA is also the prime contractor for the Defense Information Systems Agency’s milCloud 2.0 program. GDIT completed its $9.7 billion acquisition of CSRA in April (Defense Daily, April 3).