DHS plans for improved Enterprise Operations Center

The Homeland Security Department is in the early stages of acquisition planning for the Next Generation Enterprise Operations Center, a consolidation of the current EOC and Network Operations Center.

DHS officials are planning new and significantly heightened performance services to effectively operate mission critical networks while saving money and running more effectively, according to a request for information.The new ECO will support more capabilities and coordinate with network carrier and data center support contractors in operations to resolve problems. Along with incident triggers the EOC currently manages, the component agencies’ NOCs will interface with DHS’ NextGen EOC on issues related to DHS data centers and wide area network devices, also known as DHS OneNet. The DHS Enterprise Operations Center will deal with problem events and outages according to the priority level associated with the event.

Currently, EOC and NOC provide continuous monitoring, analysis, and reporting on the DHS Information Technology Infrastructure. DHS EOC provides connections and trend analysis services based on the department’s components and network vendors. Like DHS NOC, EOC is a central contact point for network management to comply with departmental policies and governmentwide mandates.

DHS released a request for information to get input on capabilities and services of DHS’ NextGen EOC, such as network performance and monitoring, service-level agreements, operations, acquisition approaches, tools, staffing, and continuity of operations. Officials are particularly interested in feedback on employing operational services for integrated oversight and enterprise response management.

The RFI was released May 16. Responses are due by June 3.