SSA extends deadline for cloud services

The Social Security Administration is extending the deadline for responses to a sources sought notice for cloud services.

SSA is collecting market research to find cloud service providers with infrastructure as a service and platform as service capabilities.

The deadline for responses has been pushed back to Jan. 11 from Jan. 7.

The sources sought notice was originally released on Dec. 17 on FBO.gov with the solicitation number SSA-RFI-16-1017.

The RFI describes three key areas SSA is interested in:

• Enterprise data warehouse capabilities that can support rapidly increasing storage and data analytical needs.
• New capabilities and technology identification and evaluation.
• Volatile use applications – applications that experience periodic variations in use that can benefit from automated or rapid scaling.

The agency currently has a pilot project called the Agency Cloud Infrastructure and Modern Development Environment. The pilot supports the application lifecycle, analysis, design, development, validation and hosting.

Now, SSA wants to move to larger scale cloud offerings and expand the pilot to include cloud-based integration and hosting services.

Later, the agency may consider software as service capabilities.

SSA also has existing cloud implementations that will need to connect with the ACI and MDE pilot. There also are in-house capabilities such as security management and user access management that will need to be considered.

And of course there is the legacy environment.

There is nice graphic describing SSA’s cloud objectives.

The RFI includes a response spreadsheet to collect information such as company demographics, services and certifications such as FedRAMP compliance or plans to become FedRAMP compliant. They also want other information such as business model, performance etc. Responses in the spreadsheet should only be four sentences long.

A Word document also allows companies to describe capabilities and offerings in more detail. That document is limited to 12 pages.

Marketing materials or references to websites will be considered.