Federal court system planning cloud computing contract

The U.S. federal court system's administrative and support agency is looking to develop a pilot program to evaluate cloud computing services for needs such as rapid infrastructure provisioning, website management and a new development environment.

Responses to a draft solicitation are due by Jan. 22 to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, according to a posting on GovTribe.

The plan is to issue a single-award blanket purchase agreement. A value hasn’t been determined for the BPA. Since it is a pilot, there doesn’t appear to be an incumbent.

Four use cases are laid out in the draft performance work statement for respondents to comment on.

Two are labeled as “critical need:”

• Rapid infrastructure provisioning, which would need to be self-provision including virtual machines and containers.
• High availability and disaster recovery, which covers backup, restore and recovery, multi-site replication, and recovery plans and application failover.

The other two use cases include services around rapid deployment and maintenance of court websites, as well as a cloud development environment.

The AO is planning a three-year pilot, which includes a one-year base and two one-year options.

While this will likely not lead to a multi-billion-dollar cloud procurement like what is happening at the defense and intelligence agencies, this work statement does lay out what is likely a more typical contract for this type of technology. The PWS offers details around metering services, security, and technical requirement for each use case.

The courts also released a performance measurement management plan that includes a framework, metrics and measures, and a blueprint for service level agreements.

Evaluations will look at technical approach and management approach. The importance of price grows as a factor when the technical and management factors are close, or when there is a significant gap in pricing that would diminish the value of a technically superior proposal.

Responses are to the draft solicitation are due Jan. 22.