DULLES, Va. The U.S. Army is modernizing and migrating its systems and applications to the cloud with help from industry. Officials at the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS) have added Technica Corp., provider of high-end systems engineering and operations and maintenance for mission-critical networks and applications in Dulles, Virginia, to its $250 million Army Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) basic ordering agreement (BOA).
Under ACCENT, Technica will support the U.S. Army in transitioning its systems and applications to FedRAMP-certified commercial cloud hosting services or an Army Enterprise Hosting Facility (AEHF). This contract is in direct alignment with the Army's data center consolidation strategy, with goals of a 75 percent reduction by 2025.
"Technica is excited to be onboarded to the ACCENT BOA, which provides access for Army and other Department of Defense (DOD) capability owners to take advantage of our proven abilities and deep knowledge in migration of enterprise systems and applications to commercial or DOD-hosted cloud environments," says Technica Vice President of Business Development Doug Sickler.
The ACCENT BOA is the preferred source for all Army commands and organizations requiring commercial cloud hosting, data center migration, transition support, and application modernization services.
Technica Corp., founded in 1991, provides high-end system engineering services to defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and federal civilian agencies. The company specializes in systems engineering; integration and testing; cybersecurity; and product development, deployment and support. Technica invests heavily in R&D and is leveraging big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and high-performance computing to support its customers.
Features of this contract include:
- Army’s preferred source when requiring commercial cloud hosting, data center migration, transition support, and application modernization services
- Multiple award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle
- Period of Performance: 2/ 27/17 – 2/26/2020 (BOA – 3 years); TOs – up to 5 years
- Valued at $248.7 million ($204 million hosting and $44 million transition/modernization)
- Available to all Army
ARMY ACCENT
The Army Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) is a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA). ACCENT allows Army solution owners the ability to obtain commercial cloud service offerings and Information Technology (IT) technical support for the transition of Army enterprise system/applications migrating to a commercial cloud environment or an Army Enterprise Hosting Facility (AEHF).
These commercial cloud hosting services can be acquired in any combination of service models, deployment models, and Impact Levels as defined in the DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) along with transition support services required to move a system/application to a cloud environment.
Cloud requirements may also include mobile computer solutions. The ACCENT BOA will be the Army’s preferred source used by all Army commands and organizations requiring commercial cloud hosting, data center migration, transition support, and application modernization services
ACCENT provides services and solutions necessary for the Army to satisfy the requirement to migrate Army enterprise systems/applications to commercial cloud service providers and/or AEHFs. Commercial cloud services are acquired based on approved Cloud Service Provider (CSO) Cloud Service Offerings (CSOs). ACCENT also enables capability owners to modernize and transition applications to CSP/CSOs and/or AEHFs, and facilitates the acquisition of modular or mobile hosting facilities.
Cloud hosting
Cloud computing solutions include the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud service models, and the Private, Community, Public, and Hybrid deployment models (as applicable). Cloud hosting solutions may require either on-premise or off-premise hosting, and support hosting of systems/applications at Information Impact Levels 2, 4, 5, or 6.
Transition support
Cloud transition support activities may include application analysis, security requirements analysis, documentation, modernization (code refactoring and augmentation), virtualization, technical engineering, migration scheduling, business process reengineering, data preparation, migration planning, interface transition planning, training on CSO environment, service transition planning, cutover planning, back out planning, and go-live support.
Modernization
Application modernization may be required as part of transition support services. Modernization is the refactoring or consolidation of legacy software programming to align it more closely with current business needs. In this case, modernizing systems/applications to migrate to commercial cloud hosting environments. The following are core activities performed in application modernization activities:
- Develop application documentation to support modernization or improve maintenance and testing efficiency.
- Identify approaches to modernize and upgrade applications to enhance business value.
- Consolidate and rationalize data and applications to eliminate redundancy, improve efficiency and make improvements to data quality.
- Enhance security to latest standards of best practice and compliance.
- Re-architect applications to leverage modern architecture standards and interface capabilities.
- Assess, plan and implement server workload consolidations to reduce cost and complexity while migrating to a modernized and scalable platform.
