NOAA Cloud Acquisition (NCloud)

Background
The NOAA Office of the Chief Information Officer through the NOAA Cloud Program Office (NCPO) requires cloud services to support the NOAA Cloud Strategy. This strategy involves multi-cloud, multi-tenant, FedRAMP certified commercial cloud computing environments and related capabilities. The aim is to enable direct access to hyperscale cloud services at all organizational levels, from strategic levels to operations in field offices.

NOAA intends to enhance its mission by leveraging advanced cloud technologies such as elastic computing, storage, and network infrastructure, providing resilient services with broad geographic accessibility, centralized management with distributed control, enhanced security measures, advanced data analytics capabilities, strong marketplace and partner networks, support for scientific research, data collaboration, and the utilization of composable multi-cloud and collective capabilities from various cloud service providers. NOAA’s acquisition strategy to achieve these goals is to pursue a multi-award Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle.

Work Details
The contract will require cloud service providers (CSPs) to demonstrate extensive infrastructure presence within the United States to ensure compliance with federal regulations and guarantee data sovereignty and security. Key capabilities include:

1) Extensive Infrastructure Presence: CSPs must have multiple data centers across at least five distinct geographical regions in the USA with at least 10 availability zones; robust disaster recovery solutions; high availability architectures;

2) Data Center and Network Capacity: CSPs must support extensive data processing and storage needs with high compute and storage capacities;

3) Comprehensive Service Portfolio: CSPs must offer a wide range of cloud services including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; managed services; self-service options; centralized management;

4) Scalability and Elasticity: CSPs must provide auto-scaling capabilities and ensure constant updates of infrastructure;

5) Security and Compliance: CSPs must implement advanced security features including identity management, automated threat identification, continuous monitoring, secure data transfer capabilities, encryption standards, and adherence to federal compliance certifications such as FedRAMP.

Place of Performance
The contract will be performed within the United States.