DHS takes first step in Cumulus cloud award process

The Homeland Security Department has taken the first step in making awards for Cumulus, its centralized contract for acquiring commercial cloud computing services across the entire enterprise.

DHS originally set up the pact to have a blend of competitive and non-competitive awards that cover all aspects of commercial cloud. This includes everything from infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.

For block one of the awards announced Tuesday, DHS said it will enter into non-competitive contracts with the four major hyperscalers on a staggered basis through the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30.

DHS estimates the award to Amazon Web Services will be finalized by the end of June, or the fiscal second quarter. The department is eyeing final awards to Oracle, Google Cloud and Microsoft by the end of the fiscal third quarter.

Each of those contracts will have a one-year base ordering period followed by up to four individual option years. Financial information on the awards was redacted from DHS’ justification-and-approval notice to announce them.

From there, DHS is creating a separate multiple-award competition to support the Cumulus effort and more details on that will apparently be forthcoming down the road.

Cumulus is part of DHS’ larger efforts to gain more visibility into cloud spending and usage across the entire department, plus achieve greater economies of scale and consistency in cloud acquisitions.

The department is also using Cumulus as a means to bring in compute, storage, database, network, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, logging and monitoring functions that are inherent with commercial cloud environments.