The General Services Administration (GSA) is working on setting up a Cloud Marketplace for Federal agencies, with the first phase of the project coming in fiscal year (FY) 2022 and a request for information also being worked on, a GSA official said today.
Laura Stanton, the assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said at a Sept. 16 FCW webinar that the RFI should be coming in the next few weeks.
“We want to put together not only a framework but also market contractual vehicle that will allow our agencies to buy these core cloud services, and that we’re seeing them need more and more,” Stanton said.
The goal of the marketplace is to put together a buying platform for agencies that would allow agencies to not only purchase licenses for cloud services but also provides a place for them to procure the IT professional services required to keep them up and running.
“We’ve learned a couple of things,” Stanton said. “We’ve learned that there is a whole host of more governance that agencies need in order to manage their cloud services. We know that there are professional IT services that agencies need when they buy the licenses.”
“So, instead of having to put do those separately or each agency look into the necessary requirements, or even having to build in their own baseline security requirements for FedRAMP, we’re looking at what was sort of that foundational set of requirements,” Stanton explained.
Stanton was wary to give away too much information, as the project is still early in its development but said the marketplace will allow agencies to streamline a bit of the cloud services procurement process and build a one-stop-shop for everything necessary to develop cloud solutions.
Stanton said the RFI is coming soon and asked that any industry members in the audience respond to it to help GSA better understand how it should put together and structure the marketplace.
“The next step is going to be an RFI that should be out in the next couple of weeks, so please everybody, keep your eyes peeled, give us feedback,” Stanton told the audience. “When we get the information that industry takes the time to give us on an RFI, we go through it, and it helps us understand how we need to make decisions.”
