Relevant links are at the bottom of this post.

• By Sean Lyngaas
• May 23, 2016

A request for proposals for the second version of the Defense Department’s on-premise cloud computing environment is coming in about two weeks, the department said in a contracting notice.

The Department of Defense rolled out milCloud, as the in-house cloud service is known, in March 2014, touting it as an opportunity for DOD agencies to save money while retaining control over their mission environments.

Defense officials have billed this next phase of the project (milCloud 2.0) as an opportunity to open DOD facilities to more cloud providers. That has long been the goal of DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen, and is already happening in places like the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia, where IBM has been granted conditional authority to host unclassified but sensitive DOD data in the cloud.

The RFP, which the notice said would come on or about June 6, is for the first phase of milCloud 2.0. The purpose of the first phase of the acquisition “is to bring commercial infrastructure services into DOD facilities, connected to DOD networks in a private deployment model for use by the DOD community,” the notice states.

The resulting contract could run up to five years.

The responsibility and liability that comes with managing DOD data will be a key issue throughout the contract’s life cycle. “The prime contractor in all DOD commercial cloud contracts must retain direct operational configuration and control of the environment,” said a DOD presentation at an industry day for milCloud 2.0.

https://fcw.com/articles/2016/05/23/son-of-milcloud.aspx

https://fcw.com/articles/2014/03/27/much-ado-about-milcloud.aspx

https://fcw.com/articles/2016/02/11/ibm-cloud-disa.aspx

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3bbc81912d0af08d1187fd23ddf87f01&tab=core&_cview=1