The U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed the selection of Amazon Web Services as prime contractor for cloud computing services on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The award was confirmed over the protests of IBM.
The contract calls for a 270-day period to achieve initial operating capability, a 4-year base ordering period, a 3-year option, and a 2-year option, with a maximum value of $600 million over the base period. The contractor is to provide its existing public cloud (modified where necessary) to be installed on government premises and operated by the provider. Performance is to include both: (1) infrastructure as a service, in which the provider (contractor) is responsible for networking, storage, servers and virtualization, and the consumers (government agencies) are responsible for the operating system, middleware, runtime, data, and applications, System Requirements Document; (2)and platform as a service, which encompasses the same components as infrastructure as a service, but only applications and data are the responsibility of the consumer.
Although IBM’s bid was lower, the agency expressed doubt about the auto-scaling capability of IBM’s public cloud and selected AWS instead.
