EPA Aims For 80% Cloud Use By 2015

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The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded a three-year, $15 million contract to IT services firm CGI Federal as part of a broad plan to shift up to 80% of its computing environment to the cloud by 2015.

The award was made under a General Services Administration blanket purchase agreement for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). CGI is one of a dozen vendors that have been approved under the BPA to provide certified, secure cloud services--including storage, virtual machines, and Web hosting--to federal agencies.

The EPA is building a hybrid cloud environment in its National Computing Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. As an external services provider, CGI will provide server hosting, virtualization, and other services, the company said in a press release. It also will help move the EPA's applications to the cloud.

[ For more on the government's move to the cloud, see 10 Developments Show Government Cloud Maturing. ]

The EPA is planning to move up to 20% of its IT environment to the cloud in the first year, and 30% in each of the next two years, according to CGI. The contract is in line with the Office of Management and Budget's Cloud First Initiative, which requires agencies to evaluate cloud computing services in lieu of do-it-yourself technology deployments.

The EPA deal is the latest of several cloud contracts that CGI has been awarded by federal agencies. In January, the company announced that it had been awarded a five-year, $21 million "cloud modernization" contract by the GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. The deal calls for CGI to host the Data.gov and USA.gov websites, provided managed cloud infrastructure, and other services to GSA.

In February, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission awarded CGI a six-year, $21 million deal to host its accounting and financial management system in CGI's Momentum Community Cloud, which is an ERP-as-a-service offering for federal agencies.

In an arrangement disclosed last year, the Department of Homeland Security is also using CGI's IaaS service for Web content management.

The Office of Management and Budget demands that federal agencies tap into a more efficient IT delivery model. The new Shared Services Mandate issue of InformationWeek Government explains how they're doing it. Also in this issue: Uncle Sam should develop an IT savings dashboard that shows the returns on its multibillion-dollar IT investment. (Free registration required.)