NOAA Sources Sought: Cloud Acquisition (NCloud) IDIQ

Notice ID: 30423

NOAA intends to enhance its mission by leveraging advanced cloud technologies such as elastic computing, storage, and network infrastructure, providing resilient services with broad geographic accessibility, centralized management with distributed control, enhanced security measures, advanced data analytics capabilities, strong marketplace and partner networks, support for scientific research, data collaboration, and the utilization of composable multi-cloud and collective capabilities from various cloud service providers.

The objective of this notice is to identify sources, including small and socioeconomic small business concerns, with the following capabilities in support of NOAA mission:

1. Extensive Infrastructure Presence: NOAA requires cloud service providers with extensive infrastructure presence within the United States to ensure stringent control and compliance with US federal regulations, guaranteeing data sovereignty and security. Geographic diversity and multiple availability zones are critical to enhancing resilience, reducing latency, and supporting NOAA’s nationwide data collection and dissemination efforts. Furthermore, robust disaster recovery solutions with multi-region failover capabilities, along with architectures designed for high availability with redundancy and failover mechanisms, are essential to maintaining NOAA’s operational continuity and data integrity in the face of potential disruptions …
2. Data Center and Network Capacity: NOAA’s mission involves extensive data processing, storage, and real-time data collection, necessitating significant data center and network capacity. High compute and storage capacities are essential for handling NOAA’s intensive computational tasks, such as weather modeling and climate simulations, while a robust national network ensures fast and reliable data transfer. Additionally, redundancy and extensive peering locations are critical to maintaining efficient and timely data dissemination …
3. Comprehensive Service Portfolio: To enable NOAA’s diverse and complex computational needs, CSPs must offer a comprehensive service portfolio that includes a wide range of cloud services, centralized management, and distributed control capabilities. These offerings support commercial innovation, advanced AI/ML capabilities, and facilitate efficient resource management …
4. Scalability and Elasticity: NOAA’s dynamic workload requires a cloud service provider capable of efficiently handling fluctuating demands while optimizing resource usage and cost. The solution must enable provisioning of compute, storage, and network infrastructure that is constantly updated, including processing architectures, servers, storage options, and platform software, at scale to meet consumption and rapid development needs. Additionally, the CSP must own, or provide proof of complete control over, and unmitigated access to, the proposed cloud …
5. Security and Compliance: Ensuring the security and compliance of NOAA’s data is paramount. The CSP must provide fortified security capabilities that enable enhanced cyber defenses from the application layer through the data layer. This includes continuous monitoring and auditing, automated threat identification, resilience, encryption at rest and in transit, secure data transfer capabilities, and operating environments that meet or exceed NOAA information security requirements …

NOAA’s acquisition strategy to achieve these goals is to pursue a multi-award Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle.

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