Department of Education begins market research for cloud capabilities
The Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office is looking to advance cloud capabilities through its Next Generation Data Center, a follow-on contract for the office’s Next Generation Cloud.
The agency said Friday in a request for information that it is conducting market research to identify a service provider to modernize and “continuously improve” the existing cloud environment provided by Amazon Web Services.
The department said in the RFI that FSA “must evolve cloud capabilities” for general purpose business use, to meet federal requirements laid out in a 2021 executive order on improving national cybersecurity and to “keep pace with today’s dynamic and increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment.”
The request states that within the first year of awarding a contract, all on-premise applications and infrastructure that remains will move to the cloud. In the second and third year of the contract, “the entire cloud environment must be optimized and modernized as a dedicated workstream” through cloud native design principles in order to take advantage of the commercial cloud’s full benefits.
“The preponderance of FSA’s applications will migrate into FSA [Next Generation Cloud], managed by the FSA chief information officer,” the request states.
This effort is unrelated to the recent updates to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was recently overhauled to leverage cloud technologies for the transmission and delivery of FAFSA data, an agency spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop.
