This briefing covers active market intelligence, regulatory guidelines, and tactical capture recommendations for federal and defense contractors pursuing opportunities in this procurement classification.
A dozen state and local governments have teamed with some of the technology industry’s biggest service providers to release model contract terms designed to standardize cloud purchasing and make it easier for public agencies to buy hosted software, infrastructure and platforms.
Private companies are rapidly moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud, freeing them from costly maintenance for legacy systems and making technology upgrades much more nimble. But government agencies have struggled to embrace hosted services because the cloud often clashes with traditional public purchasing rules and practices.
Too often, agency procurement officers try to purchase cloud technology using contract language designed for physical products, while vendors approach the public sector with boilerplate agreements that don’t address government needs. All of these factors tend to slow down cloud procurement — or block it altogether — and limit the number of companies that will bid on government projects.
A new cloud procurement report — the product of nine months of meetings orchestrated by e.Republic’s Center for Digital Government — gives CIOs, procurement officials and cloud providers a common language that sets the stage for a wider adoption of cloud technology in the public sector. (Government Technology and the Center for Digital Government are both owned by e.Republic Inc.)
Released Wednesday, Sept. 10, the report’s model terms and conditions can be used by state and local agencies as baseline language for procurement contracts for software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The recommendations cover key sticking points like ownership and protection of data, auditing of cloud-based systems, breach notification and liability for stolen information.
A workgroup created to develop the report launched its activities in Trenton, N.J., in January, hosted by New Jersey CIO Steve Emanuel. Those early meetings uncovered a split between government and service providers on what moving to the cloud entailed, said Todd Sander, executive director of the Center for Digital Government.
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