Commerce agency considers shift to new cloud platform

The Commerce Department’s National Technical Information System is asking for responses on a plan for a nationwide enterprise-class cloud management system platform.

NTIS wants the cloud platform to be on-demand and self-service. It should have resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, and an integrated platform-as-a-service aspect. Along with these parts, officials are asking for open data and development potential so users can publish and host datasets and data-driven applications while making them accessible to consumers across platforms.

NTIS has provided other government agencies with software-as-a-service for several years in a federal compliant environment. Its mission has been modified to emphasize data science. As it moves ahead, it is migrating its data recovery site for the NTIS internal business system to the cloud. The initial migration could lead to more migrations of agency, consumer and partner systems.

In the new request for information, NTIS wants insights on the migration, as well as various X as-a-service services, virtual private cloud utilization, high-performance computing environment, auto-scaling, disaster recovery, and real-time access to status and metadata.

NTIS’s primary mission has been collecting and organizing scientific, technical, engineering and business information that the federal government-sponsored research and development from industry, agencies and academia. It also works with other federal agencies to establish IT programs and projects.

NTIS released the RFI April 6. Responses are due by May 15.