USDA Sources Sought: Secure Data Enclave Services

Notice ID:  1232SA24Q0053

A market survey is being conducted to determine if there are adequate Small Business, SBA [1] certified HUBZone, SBA-certified 8(a), Women-Owned, or Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) contractors available for a proposed project who meet the specific criteria outlined below.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistical agencies and units, Economic Research Service (ERS), National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS), and Agricultural Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) seek to procure data enclave services to serve as a secure computing and collaboration workspace. This workspace will be a highly controlled, secure space for both USDA employees and approved external users across the United States that allows them to conduct approved research and work with restricted-access datasets.  This requirement will allow USDA the continuity to provide data users access to restricted-access data in a secure enclave environment.

Enclave Technical Requirements

Security Overview

Security requirements are defined by the FedRAMP Moderate Impact overlay to the NIST SP 800-53 Moderate Impact minimum security controls. The FedRAMP and National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) Special Publication (SP) 800-53, Revision 4, Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations, PL-8 (Information Security Architecture) require that the developer of an information system develop a security architecture that describes the approach taken with regard to protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Government information and ensures appropriate security levels of staff are maintained.

Scalability

The platform will need to be a state-of-the-art, cloud-based, scalable environment for USDA to be able to meet developing needs of researchers and the participating agencies. This involves the capacity to implement continuing improvements to the development strategy, enclave design, and appropriate technology to ensure the sustainability of the data enclave and meet increased or expanding workloads and operational demands. The ability to onboard all relevant USDA staff members is necessary. Cost efficiency in scalability is ideal. Scalability will enable USDA to respond appropriately and cost-effectively to evolving needs for increased storage and performance. The Enclave should follow ‘scalability in depth’ design to enable end to end scalability in its core infrastructure. Agencies/Projects can acquire additional end user computing, database, and storage resources to meet their growth needs and similarly, they can release these resources when they no longer need them. To support the growing number of project workspaces, researcher accounts, and data volume, the scalability is embedded in the following three layers:

• An End User Compute (App stream Images) – An end user compute that offers both vertical and horizontal scalability. For example, when the need arises, a user’s machine can be quickly upgraded from a lower compute power (e.g. 2 vCPU (Virtual Central Processing Unit), 8GB (Gigabyte) memory) machine to a higher compute power machine (e.g. 4 vCPU, 16GB memory). Similarly, when the need arises, and a project workspace needs to add additional researchers to the project (e.g., 50 additional researchers), then the ability exists to provision those additional end user compute machines on a short notice and, upon completion of the project, those additional machines can be quickly released.
• Database – The amount of data that individual projects need to analyze is growing exponentially as is the number of researchers who need to analyze this growing set of data. USDA requires an enclave that can deploy a massively parallel …

Storage

• Structured Data – The single instance of a database solution can scale up to storing 16PB (Petabyte) of structured data and can stand up additional database instances as the need arises.
• Unstructured Data – The ability to host at least 5PB of unstructured data, with the ability to stand up additional unstructured data storage as the need arises.
• Data Archival and Restoration – Inactive data and/or user workspace can be archived and later restored as necessary …

The period of performance for this procurement is a base year with four one –year option periods.

Read more here.

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