Following through on a much anticipated action, GSA released their Cloud Computing Request For Quotation (RFQ) today. Cloud computing is a major part of President Obama's reform effort and this RFQ focuses on IaaS service offerings available within a public cloud deployment model. The implementation is a Low Impact System as defined in National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 199.

According to that publication, the potential impact is low if the loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability could be expected to have a limited adverse effect on organizational operations, organizational assets, or individuals. A limited adverse effect means that, for example, the loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability might:

• cause a degradation in mission capability to an extent and duration that the organization is able to perform its primary functions, but the effectiveness of the functions is noticeably reduced;
• result in minor damage to organizational assets
• result in minor financial loss; or
• result in minor harm to individuals.

The objective of this RFQ is to offer three key service offerings through IaaS providers for ordering activities and have been divided into three distinct Lots:

• Lot 1: Cloud Storage Services (Section 4.3.1)
• Lot 2: Virtual Machines (Section 4.3.2)
• Lot 3: Cloud Web Hosting (Section 4.3.3)

A excerpt of the presentation is available below.

The full hour long  video presentation on the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative is also available.

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