Cloud Computing Protest Offers Lessons For Buyers & Suppliers

June 23, 2017 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from PublicSpendingForum. Author: Frank McNally.

A recent protest decision from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides several important lessons for procurement professionals who are buying cloud-enabled services as well as vendors hoping to sell them. Let’s dive in! Red River Computing Company protested the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) request for quotations (RFQ) for agency-wide enterprise computing services and cloud computing services.

Red River challenged both the technical and price evaluation, asserting that DHS’s best-value determination was flawed. GAO denied Red River’s challenge of the technical evaluation but sustained its challenge of the price evaluation. Each decision is instructive, so let’s take a closer look…

Clarifications, Discussions, Exchanges…Oh My!

DHS issued the RFQ to GSA IT 70 schedule holders with the intent to award three blanket purchase agreements (BPAs), under which the agency could issue fixed price and/or time and material order types. Vendors would provide "access to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services, either directly from cloud service providers or through resellers." The solicitation required that services include commercial, commodity-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud services authorized under GSA’s Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program, or FedRAMP…

Read more from the source @ http://www.publicspendforum.net/blogs/frank-mcnally/2017/06/22/cloud-computing-protest-decision-offers-lessons-for-buyers-suppliers