DLT nets $1M Amazon Web Services contract

DLT Solutions will provide the National Science Foundation with Amazon Web Services as part of a sole source contract that grew out of a pilot project.

The contract is worth at least $172,500 but has a ceiling of $1 million.

According to the NSF justification document, it would be too expensive and time consuming to the switch to another cloud provider.

In 2012, NSF reviewed infrastructure as a service hosting providers for a pilot to house its SharePoint environment. They picked AWS and the pilot was successful, according to the document.

For three years, the environment has been used as a collaboration portal for NSF staff to work with people and institutions outside of NSF.

The new contract is needed because NSF is upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

Moving to another cloud provider would cost more than maintaining the current situation. It also would jeopardize NSF work on its Graduate Research Fellowship Program for fiscal 2016. The agency expects to receive 13,000 applications in November and will be processing them from December through February.

The agency estimates that migration to a new hosting facility would cost between $125,000 and $350,000. NSF says it would also need to insource work, which would add another $100,000 to $200,000.

NSF picked AWS for the pilot because it was already hosting SharePoint for seven other agencies and it had the lowest cost estimate. AWS also has a government cloud that is separate from the public cloud and it holds a FedRAMP certification.