Platform and Infrastructure for Cloud Archival Depositories (PICARD) IaaS / PaaS

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) intends to restrict competition to certified/authorized Amazon Web Services (AWS) resellers to award a single award blanket purchase agreement (BPA) against the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS), Special Item Number (SIN) 518210C, Cloud and Cloud-Related IT Professional Services. NARA has an ongoing requirement for AWS Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) hosting for FedRAMP Moderate and High impact level systems. The expected period of performance will be September 30, 2021, through September 29, 2022, plus four option years. The estimated total value of the brand name portion of this requirement is $85,000,000.00.

NARA has built and is currently operating four major mission-critical systems that are being hosted in AWS Commercial and GovCloud IaaS/PaaS environments. These applications are deployed in AWS and were designed to leverage AWS-specific programmatic provisioning capabilities. NARA has invested over $50,000,000 in the development of the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system mandated by Congress. Additionally, NARA has developed other systems used to make the records of the Federal Government available to the public at a cost of over $4,000,000. These systems cannot be moved to another cloud provider without redesigning and re-engineering them from scratch and migrating terabytes of data.

NARA conducted extensive market research and found a significant number of certified authorized AWS resellers available. The market research also indicated that there are vendors capable of reselling more than one cloud service. The majority of NARA's requirements are for hosting its systems currently in the AWS cloud. However, as part of this single award BPA, NARA is expanding the available pool of CSPs on a limited basis as it creates new applications and systems. The requirement for the reseller to have two additional CSP services creates an avenue for NARA to work toward eliminating vendor lock and testing cloud-agnostic solutions.