CybersecurityDHS begins move to cloud

Last week, federal officials announced that DHS had made its first move to begin consolidating and migrating many of its public websites to cloud servers to reduce costs.

On Thursday, Mary Davie, assistant commissioner of GSA’s Integrated Technology Services (ITS) office, wrote in an official blog post, “I’m thrilled to announce that the Department of Homeland Security has awarded the first task order using GSA’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA).”

In compliance with the Obama administration’s “cloud first” policy, DHS will begin migrating many of its public websites to cloud servers with the help of CGI Federal Inc.

Under the five-year, $5 million contract, CGI Federal Inc. will provide DHS with hosting, managing, and security for its public websites including DHS.gov, FEMA.gov, and USCIS.gov.

CGI will also provide enterprise development services along with integration, testing, training, staging, troubleshooting, and production services.

The cloud first policy encourages government agencies to use web-based cloud computing services rather than operating its own servers and hardware in an effort to reduce costs. The White House and the Federal Communications Commission have already moved their websites to the cloud.

“The flexibility of our BPA gives federal, state, local and tribal governments faster, easier access to a host of infrastructure offerings, including cloud storage, web hosting and virtual machines,” Davie said. “These are technologies that will greatly reduce infrastructure maintenance costs and make government more efficient and cost effective.”

“DHS’ move to the cloud is being watched closely as it’s one of the largest agencies to put the ‘cloud-first’ policy into practice,” said Eric Wolking, senior vice president of CGI.