Peraton claims $2.7B DHS cloud migration win

While bids were due in February, the newly-merged and recasted Peraton can tout itself (for now) as the winner of a much-anticipated cloud computing migration contract with the Homeland Security Department.

DHS on Wednesday awarded the potential 10-year, $2.7 billion contract to a proposal submitted by the legacy Perspecta company that combined with Peraton three months after the deadline for bid submissions.

The award notice says work will take place over a five-year base period, followed by a three-year option period and another two-year option.

Known by the acronym DCCO, the single-award Data Center and Optimization Support Services contract was pursued by seven bidders including Peraton/Perspecta and took place as a three-phase competition with a down-select after each round. The other six competitors have the option to protest pending DHS' post-award debriefing and explanation.

DHS currently has two main data centers that house its IT and other assets, aptly named Data Center 1 and Data Center 2.

Peraton will first migrate everything in Data Center 1 to the new environment, then focus attention on D Data Center 2. Perspecta is the current manager of Data Center 2, while General Dynamics IT is the contractor for Data Center 1.

Herndon, Virginia-headquartered Peraton has been tasked with helping DHS manage a hybrid computing environment that includes a data center, colocation sites, and commercial and private cloud computing services. DHS also seeks to automate, optimize and modernize that environment.

The general idea is for a systems integrator like Peraton to manage that setup with the involvement of cloud hosting providers and other software vendors.

Both unclassified and classified IT systems, data and applications will be housed in that environment as the department seeks to move to a mix of data center-based hosting and infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.