DHS finalizes first Cumulus cloud contract with AWS
Gettyimages.com / Jason Marz
By
Ross Wilkers
The Homeland Security Department is working on contracts with the other three major hyperscalers and a separate, multiple-award competition for support services.
The Homeland Security Department has finalized the first out of four awards under Cumulus, a centralized contract for acquiring commercial cloud computing services across the entire organization.
Amazon Web Services’ portion of the contract will have a $2.5 billion ceiling over up to five years, DHS said in a Friday Sam.gov notice.
The department is now working on awards to Oracle, Google Cloud and Microsoft with the goal of finalizing those by the end of the calendar year’s second quarter, or the end of this month.
Each award under Cumulus will cover a one-year base period and up to four individual option years.
DHS created Cumulus to have a mix of competitive and non-competitive awards across all aspects of commercial cloud to include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.
After signing the hyperscalers’ contracts, DHS will create a multiple-award competition to support the Cumulus effort with more details to be released at a later date.
The department sees Cumulus as its means to gain greater visibility into cloud spending and usage across all agencies and components with the goal of achieving more economies of scale and consistency in acquisitions.