Navy awards commercial cloud deal

The CSRA business of General Dynamics’ IT services division has won a key contract with the Navy to help the branch accelerate its adoption and migration to commercial cloud computing technologies.

This five-year blanket purchase agreement has a $95.8 million ceiling value over one year followed by four one-year options. The pact aims to support a “multi-vendor, multi-cloud ecosystem” in line with the Defense Department’s overall commercial cloud push, according to a Wednesday release from the Navy’s program executive office for enterprise information systems.

Three other bidders offered quotations for the BPA, the Defense Department said in its Wednesday awards digest. Cloud services listed in that award notice include Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but additional team members and cloud service providers can join the team led by GDIT, which acquired CSRA in April.

GDIT will essentially act as the commercial cloud broker for the Navy as the branch pushes to transfer, host, operate and sustain IT services in cloud environments. In its release, PEO EIS said the pact aligns with the Navy’s “Fit-for-Purpose” approach to acquisitions of commercial cloud tools.

“The cloud model is a new one for us and we are mindful of the shared cybersecurity responsibility which is different than how we manage and protect data today,” said Navy Cyber Security Division Director Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett in the release. “We have worked very hard over the last 15 months to ensure we have mechanisms in place to properly execute the command and control functions of our information in the cloud, and we will learn more as we progress."

“Success with our cloud approach is realized when the individual cloud brokers across the enterprise are able to deliver cloud services at speed to meet the needs of all our Navy consumers,” the EIS program executive officer Ruth Youngs Lew said. “The enterprise cloud agreement is part of a growing portfolio of cloud services available to our Navy cloud brokers and their customers. This fits with our goal of accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies in order to deliver greater capacity which is critical to maintaining our technological advantage”

CSRA’s team for the BPA includes Beyond20, Carahsoft and Minburn Technology Group. The Navy awarded the pact through the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70 vehicle.