USAF - Remote Engineering Support Center Cloud Services - MRAS

The General Services Administration (GSA), on behalf of the United States Air Force (USAF), is conducting market research to support the 38th Engineering Squadron (38 ES) at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. The primary goal is to enhance the squadron's capabilities in rapid prototyping, development, and deployment of technical solutions through cloud services. This initiative aligns with the broader mission of the 38 ES as a key engineering component of AFCYBER within the 16th Air Force, responsible for designing and implementing advanced solutions across the Air Force enterprise.

The work being requested involves providing a credit-balance in cloud services that will enable the 38 ES to deploy various technical solutions on an ad-hoc basis. The squadron requires access to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings under a FedRAMP High Environment up to Information Level 5. This setup will allow engineers to maintain proficiency in products such as network appliances, firewalls, load balancers, application proxies, Windows servers, directory services, endpoint threat detection systems, AI tools testing among others. By leveraging cloud services rather than owning and operating infrastructure continuously, 38 ES can efficiently manage resources based on mission needs while supporting vital Air Force missions.

Key requirements for this contract include ensuring multiple regions with redundant availability zones are available from vendors. These regions must have datacenters located at least 500 miles apart to prevent localized failures. Additionally, there must be robust administrative segmentation based on user roles with varying permission levels and capabilities for monitoring spending based on current utilization. The virtualized infrastructure should support commercially available operating systems and provide flexibility in specifying resources like processor type, cores number, RAM amount, storage capacity along with graphic compute capabilities.

Furthermore, it is crucial that all applicable Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Information Assurance (IA) products comply with AFI 17-130 standards related to cybersecurity program management within DoD networks. The ability for users to access cloud resources from both DoD and commercial networks while enforcing two-factor or multi-factor authentication is also vital for maintaining security protocols during operations.