VA embarks on its search for enterprise cloud broker
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By
Ross Wilkers
This contract would designate a company as the Veterans Affairs Department's primary assistant in acquiring cloud computing capabilities from the hyperscalers and software tool makers.
The Veterans Affairs Department has kicked off market research efforts to inform how it could create a new enterprise cloud brokerage contract that would aid in VA’s overall modernization push.
In the role of broker, one company is tasked with helping VA examine and acquire cloud computing capabilities from the hyperscalers and software-as-a-service providers. The idea behind that approach is to help VA manage its multi-cloud environment and unify functions such as governance, security and automation.
A request for information posted Tuesday describes how VA is also interested in further exploring the FinOps concept, a framework that brings together financial management functions and the DevOps software development practice.
VA has several ongoing pilots and governance programs in place as part of its push toward greater adoption of FinOps practices, which aim to bring more financial accountability and transparency into engineering processes.
Therefore, the RFI’s emphasis on FinOps indicates VA is looking at spending as of equal or greater importance to the cloud technologies themselves.
“For those in the cloud, FinOps, or federal IT community, this initiative represents a major opportunity to help shape the future of the VA enterprise cloud in how one of the largest federal enterprises will manage cloud services at scale,” David Foster, VA’s head of infrastructure operations and enterprise cloud, wrote in a LinkedIn post accompanying the RFI.
The RFI describes VA’s enterprise cloud environment as currently being home to 757 applications from multiple providers, inclusive of the hyperscalers and SaaS companies.
VA’s idea for exploring a brokerage model is to incorporate more cloud service provider credit procurement, chargeback and showback processes, governance enforcement, security and compliance monitoring, and automated provisioning.
A future contract would cover up to six years in total, starting with an initial base year followed by up to five individual option years.
Responses to the RFI are due by 9 a.m. Eastern time on June 22.