In a request for information (RFI), the U.S. Army said it needs an enterprise scale contractual vehicle or agreement to modernize and migrate Army applications and data into commercial cloud environments.
The Army said that the vast majority of its apps will need to migrate into cARMY, which is the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Environment currently managed by the Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA) and Office of the Chief Information Office (OCIO) Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA). However, the RFI explains that before migrating into cARMY applications must be modernized using Cloud Native Design principles. This will allow the Army to “take advantage of the full benefits of commercial cloud.”
ECMA identifies four objectives in the RFI:
- Conduct application assessment;
- Application modernization and migration into commercial cloud/cARMY;
- Operations, maintenance and continual enhancement of applications; and
- Training
Expanding on the four objectives, ECMA said the eventual contractor will be performing deep application assessments and modernizing and migrating applications into DoD authorized Impact Level 2, 4, 5, and 6 commercial cloud environments. The application assessments are intended to allow the Army to make “an intelligent business decision as to whether and how to refactor, re-platform, recode or replace each application to best meet mission requirements.”
After the Army uses the app assessment to determine its path forward, the contractor will be responsible for modernizing and migrating the apps into the cloud. The RFI noted that the contractor should assume that the Army will modernize and migrate 50-150 apps per year. ECMA also said that the scope of this effort also includes optional capabilities to operate and continually enhance Army Applications once they have migrated into the cloud.
The RFI provides scant details on what the eventual contract will look like, but does ask interested parties for their preferred contract type (e.g., Firm-Fixed Price, Time and Materials, etc.) and rationale for each type.
