Email-as-a-service

In today’s Federal Newscast, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), the head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, wants all hands on deck to address veteran suicide.

At an industry day for the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) program, GSA and DoD officials laid out an aggressive timeline to release the solicitation and make an award.

Mike Horton, the chief information officer of the DHS IG’s office, said his top priority is transitioning their current local data center to a federal cloud, and that move opens the door to other priorities, including a laptop refresh, migrating their public website to a public cloud that is more agile and extending the capabilities of their email-as-a-service.

GSA, on behalf of the Defense Information Systems Agency, made a $296 million award for email-as-a-service to Dell Federal. GSA made the award to Dell June 19.

The never-ending talk about cloud computing makes it seem like agencies have fully bought in and everything is going to the cloud. But a recent event with several federal technology executives showed just how far cloud and open source have to go.

The Navy is testing Microsoft’s Office 365 as one potential option for migrating its email users to a cloud-based service. But the cost of securing the system is yet to be determined.

The agency announced it awarded Onix, the company which protested the 2010 contract, a $35 million deal to provide email-as-a-service to 92,000 employees. Under the terms of the deal, Onix must fully migrate Interior employees to the cloud by December.

The agency fixes the issues found by GAO after two vendors protested the contract. Vendors must submit new or revised proposals by Dec. 20.

The department released a request for information for 11 email and collaboration services in the cloud. The RFI comes after Onix and Google dropped its protest of Interior’s award to Softchoice and Microsoft for cloud email in October 2010.

Two vendors found success in the claim that GSA was unfair in requiring data centers to be housed only in Trade Agreements Act designated countries. GAO also said GSA was ambiguous in its security requirements for cloud data centers. But the vendors lost on their protest of GSA’s requirement for a ”government-only” cloud.