GSA signs up continuous monitoring vendor

The General Services Administration is fine-tuning management of its government-wide contract for continuous diagnostic and mitigation solutions, cutting a task order for agency and federal-level dashboards for the project and streamlining some of its administrative functions.

Scott Robertson, senior project manager of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service's Federal Systems Integration and Management Center (FedSIM), said the agency issued a task order March 3 to Metrica Team Venture, an Alliant Small Business prime contractor, for the agency- and federal-level CDM dashboards. GSA declined further immediate comment on the order citing procedural rules.

The agency and federal dashboards are a critical piece of the CDM program overseen by the Department of Homeland Security that aims to provide a strategy for preventing, monitoring and actively removing cyber threats on government networks. GSA is responsible for making the cybersecurity tools available to agencies through government-wide purchasing agreements.

The two automated dashboards will continually collect network security data at the agency level, make it available to the agency's security managers uniformly, then pass it up to the federal dashboard for others agencies to use, providing a comprehensive view of the federal cybersecurity environment.

DHS began rolling out orders under the $6 billion CDM multiple source contracts in January, when it issued $60 million in task orders to four of the 17 companies that provide hardware and software for the project. It has since issued several more.

Speaking at a March 7 AFCEA breakfast panel discussion on CDM's progress, Robertson said the blanket purchasing agreements supporting the CDM strategy "are still in their infancy," and GSA is making adjustments to them as agency and industry needs dictate.

For example, to facilitate use of the agreements, GSA is working to automate its delegation of procurement authority process, which allows agencies to buy from the BPAs, Robertson said. The agency is also swiftlyl working through a backlog of BPA modification requests from vendors that look to add or change products and services in their CDM offerings, according to Cristen Cole, a contracting officer's representative for the GSA/DHS continuous monitoring as a service BPA.