The US Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration has a requirement for Next Generation Data Center Hosting Solution.

FDA currently manages its worldwide IT infrastructure from three on-premise enterprise data centers in a Government-owned/Contractor-operated (GOCO) model. This solution has a number of drawbacks. First, the FDA is responsible for acquiring and maintaining all of the equipment that resides within the data center and IT spaces. Second, it is becoming costly to continuously upgrade the infrastructure within the Data Center and LAN closets due to the rapid pace of technology change (hardware and services) taking place in the marketplace. Third, the charge back for services is not straight forward with the current time & material contract model. FDA has decided it is in the best interest of the organization to move away from a GOCO Data Center environment to Government Owned Facility Contractor Owned and Contractor Operated (GOFCOCO) infrastructure data center environment in a managed service model while operating in the existing data center facilities.

Each type of ordered hosting service consists of a bundle of activities, e.g., operations and maintenance (O&M), security, disaster recovery, capacity planning and other related and necessary services. The VDC is classified as a common system and VDC system controls apply to both infrastructure and hosted applications. Approximately 60% of the hosted applications are operating on virtualized servers. Others have not been virtualized largely due to application constraints.

Previously completed contractual efforts have enabled FDA to define the approach for developing the managed hosting service. These initial efforts included an analysis of FDA’s current portfolio of applications which determined that FDA could continue to diversify its current VDC into IT as a Service (ITaaS). FDA has completed an initial cloud suitability analysis of its application stack and has determined approximately 60% of the applications may be able to be transitioned to a hybrid or private cloud (94% private, 6% public; or 100% private) while the remaining 40% of applications would be best suited in a COCO data center. The private cloud infrastructure must be dedicated solely to FDA.

Based on this initial analysis, FDA has developed a high-level strategy which includes infrastructure ownership, operations and managed services for two service delivery models: Cloud (AWS, AZURE), GOFCOCO (WODC, ADC, NCTR and LAN closets). As part of the scope, incoming contractor will transfer of ownership of current government owned equipment within designated FDA data centers to the contractor.

• Phase 1 – Transition Planning: Within 3 weeks of contract award the incoming vendor will perform their required due diligence and submit a detailed transition plan to the FDA.
  Phase 2 – Transition: Based on an approved transition plan for a transition period, incoming contractor will perform knowledge transition and operations takeover from incumbent contractor.
  Phase 3 – Cutover to Managed Services-Based Operations.