DHS’ Cappello Previews New Eclipse Cloud Acquisition Vehicle
Summary
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is launching a new cloud acquisition strategy that will offer a strategic sourcing vehicle useful to all DHS components for cloud adoption, a top agency tech official announced today. Beth Cappello, deputy chief information officer (CIO) at DHS, said the 22 different components within DHS have different appropriated dollars and mission sets, with varying progress on their cloud services journey. “One of the things that we’re trying to facilitate at DHS OCIO is an acquisition strategy that will support this need for agility and flexibility and scalability within the components – and basically give them an easy button so that when they’re ready, and when they have needs, they’ll have a vehicle available that will support their requirements,” Cappello said at an FCW event today. “This is our enterprise strategic sourcing vehicle for cloud infrastructure hosting services. This strategic sourcing vehicle will allow for consistency, ease of use, streamlining ordering, and maximizing efficiency.” Cappello said the acquisition vehicle is “still in development,” but DHS already held an industry day last week that her team found “really useful” in gathering feedback from industry and ensuring that DHS will “get the best quality acquisition vehicle out there.” She stressed that the goal of the Eclipse effort is to find a product that is useful to all DHS components, similar to the data center and cloud optimization contract that DHS awarded last year.