The size & specs of ECS Federal's cyber dashboard win
By
Ross Wilkers
ECS Federal's selection to integrate and roll out a dashboard for the Homeland Security "CDM" cyber program was unveiled late last week. We now have some more details on the size and scope of that contract.
The Homeland Security Department has chosen ECS Federal to integrate and roll out a dashboard in support of the government-wide Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program for adopting new cyber tools and services.
Our sister publications GCN and FCW first reported the award of a contract to ECS on Friday. The contract has a ceiling value of $276.1 million over up to six years, including up to $29.8 million for the initial base year. ECS won the work over two other bidders, according to Federal Procurement Data System information.
Global technology and staffing services company ASGN acquired ECS last year for $775 million.
At a May 22 FCW event, CDM Program Manager Kevin Cox described the dashboard as key to helping DHS lay a framework for and grow its use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in order to handle the “treasure trove” of data collected.'
"It's going to take us a few years to get everything in place, but this is what's going to enable us to get to the more advanced capabilities," Cox said at the event.
"Being able to bring in machine learning to interact with the data and get additional value for the agencies, bringing in AI to write the algorithms to really expand out what we can do with the data.
"Because we do really have a treasure trove of data here, not just from a security standpoint but also from an operational standpoint."
The contract is also envisioned at helping better integrate and feed data into AWARE, a new risk-scoring algorithm DHS will use to evaluate the cyber posture of agencies participating in CDM. DHS is eyeing a soft launch of that algorithm in October.
DHS competed the dashboard work as a task order via the General Services Administration’s Alliant 2 contract for IT services and solutions.