State Department Wants a Small Business to Manage Its Cloud Office

The State Department is looking for a contractor to support its centralized cloud management efforts and, ideally, wants a small business to fill the role.

While agencies across government have been moving to cloud services over the last 10 years—first under the Obama-era Cloud First policy, then under the Trump administration’s Cloud Smart—the State Department has seen particular value in the move, as its operations are spread across the globe.

“If the federal government is involved in activities overseas, the State Department is involved. … It’s not a simple mission set. And it varies depending on what country you’re in,” then-CIO Stuart McGuigan said at a January 2020 event. “Between cloud—the ability to scale up, scale down—and agile, the sweet spot of tech is moving to the sweet spot of the State Department.”

The Cloud Program Management Office was stood up two years ago to serve as the central organizing office for all of the department’s cloud efforts. In a sources sought notice posted to beta.SAM.gov, the office put out a call for prospective vendors to support these efforts.

“The office implements and sustains an enterprise cloud ecosystem to provide the full range of business solutions to end users and shared service providers leveraging multiple ‘best in breed’ commercial cloud vendors,” the notice states. “The office manages the development, delivery and operations of new and existing enterprise cloud services.”

The office achieves this by offering a variety of managed services, including cybersecurity, infrastructure and access to agencywide contracts.

The Cloud PMO also looks for new technologies and use cases and assesses the fit within the department’s environment.

“The office identifies potential areas where new tools and technologies can be used, or where new ones need to be developed, especially regarding future business expansion,” the notice states.

The sources sought notice outlines five tasks that will likely be a part of the final solicitation:

• Cloud-ready application development: Design and develop cloud applications for a number of cloud solutions such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, or other cloud solutions that are currently used by the department or may be leveraged in the future. 
• IaaS, PaaS and SaaS management: Assist the government in its management of infrastructure-as-a-service platforms, including but, not limited to Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The contractor shall assist the government in its management of platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service platforms, including but not limited to Google Workspace, ServiceNow and SalesForce. 
• IT collaboration support: Provide leadership and technical support for the development and oversight of the execution of design solutions for customer transitions. 
• IT budget reporting and administrative support: Assist with drafting and managing the CPMO fiscal year budget request.
• Special studies and expert services: The contractor shall support the program by providing, as may be required from time to time, special studies and analyses, expert services and management analyses and participation on working groups or panels, as determined by the program manager. This may include providing support to other Information Resource Management offices, as directed. 

The notice offers additional details on what is expected under each task.

The sources sought notice is looking for feedback from 8(a)-certified small businesses on whether they can deliver on these tasks.

In a question and answer document, contracting officers said the office expects to make a single award “as soon as possible.”