A public cloud for NOAA

What: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's request for information on an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.

Why: In 2011, NOAA launched a procurement vehicle called NOAALink to help the agency in its quest to drive down IT costs and meet parameters set by the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, the cloud-first policy, and the 25-Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT.

Now, NOAA is seeking an IaaS-based public cloud to provide virtualization, storage services, network bandwidth, and management tools and capabilities.

"These capabilities will enable NOAA to adhere to federal mandates, advance data center optimization objectives, achieve increased efficiencies through the provisioning of virtual machines from a cloud service provider and ensure a standard approach to security assessments, authorization and continuous monitoring of the cloud solution," according to NOAA's statement of need.

The goal is to find a solution that will allow the agency to manage and provision an environment that can scale up or down depending on users' needs. For that reason, NOAA is seeking services with fixed-pricing options that assume volume discounts.

The RFI also specifies that virtual machines in the cloud must serve as an alternative to refreshing physical servers and "provide rapid scalability or elasticity as needed." The solution must also allow NOAA to transfer data from its premises to the public cloud and vice versa and between any two locations in the cloud.

According to the agency's statement of need, officials ultimately plan to award an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract to a single cloud service provider or agency that has been certified under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

Responses must be submitted to NOAA by 10 a.m. EST on Nov. 28.

Read the RFI here.