JA for Exception to Fair Opportunity - C2E AWS Enterprise Cloud_Redacted.pdf

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

FAR 16.507-6(b)(2), Items Peculiar to One Manufacturer

National Archives and Records Administration 8601 Adelphi Road

College Park, MD 20740-6001

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Enterprise Cloud

Technical or Requirements Personnel Certification:

I hereby certify that this justification for an exception to fair opportunity for items peculiar to one manufacturer is made in good faith, that the supporting data and information are accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief, and that I would not be making this request if it were feasible to fully compete this requirement. I further certify this request is not the result of a desire to expend funds while those funds are still available.

Contracting Officer Concurrence:

I have reviewed this justification and conclude that it is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

General Counsel Concurrence:

I have reviewed this justification and consider it legally sufficient.

NARA Competition Advocate Concurrence:

I have reviewed this justification and hereby certify that it is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

NARA Head of Procuring Activity Approval:

I have reviewed this justification and hereby certify that it is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief. In accordance with FAR 16.507-6(e)(3) and NARA 501, I approve this justification.

I. IDENTIFICATION OF THE AGENCY AND THE CONTRACTING ACTIVITY, AND

SPECIFIC IDENTIFICATION OF THE DOCUMENT AS A “JUSTIFICATION FOR

AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY”.

See page 1.

II. NATURE AND/OR DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTION BEING APPROVED.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) intends to restrict competition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to award a sole source task order under AWS’ Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) Contract No.

2021-20101900401.

III. A DESCRIPTION OF THE SUPPLIES OR SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET THE

AGENCY’S NEEDS (INCLUDING THE ESTIMATED VALUE).

Over the past 10+ years, NARA has utilized the AWS Commercial and GovCloud hosting environments to build and operate a majority of its mission critical applications. In 2020, NARA awarded a single award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) under the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) to provide for continued, enterprise-wide, commercial cloud hosting services from AWS as well as two other Cloud Service Providers (CSPs): Azure and Google. The scope of this order includes access to all available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud service offerings. The BPA is set to expire on September 29, 2026. NARA requires a new, enterprise cloud hosting vehicle that will provide for continued and seamless access to AWS hosting and consulting support services to effectively maintain its mission critical applications that are currently being developed, currently being migrated to, or currently in production in AWS Commercial or GovCloud environments. Additionally, NARA’s strategic roadmap explicitly requires future expansion into classified cloud enclaves, specifically at the Secret, Top Secret, and TS/SCI levels. This proposed C2E task order will provide direct access to the full breadth of AWS’ commercially offered cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), as well as access to AWS classified environments (Secret and Top Secret) to support the development and implementation of “sister” classified systems, which must maintain feature and service parity with their unclassified counterparts. The task order will also provide access to AWS Professional Services to support planning, design, development, acquisition, provisioning, cost optimization, and implementation of NARA’s current and future AWS cloud-based systems and applications.

In order to effectively and efficiently maintain its mission critical applications that are currently being developed, currently being migrated to, or currently in production in AWS, NARA will require continued, unfettered access to AWS for the foreseeable future. The period of performance will include a 12-month base period, along with nine (9) 12-month option periods.

This 10-year period of performance is consistent with the terms and conditions of the parent C2E IDIQ contract ordering guidelines.The estimated total potential value of this requirement is with 77% of this estimate for Commercial and GovCloud hosting utilization, and the remaining 28% for classified hosting and professional services.

IV. IDENTIFICATION OF THE EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY AND THE

SUPPORTING RATIONALE, INCLUDING A DEMONSTRATION THAT THE

PROPOSED CONTRACTOR’S UNIQUE QUALIFICATIONS OR THE NATURE OF

THE ACQUISITION REQUIRES USE OF THE EXCEPTION CITED. IF THE

CONTRACTING OFFICER USES THE LOGICAL FOLLOW-ON EXCEPTION, THE

RATIONALE SHALL DESCRIBE WHY THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE

INITIAL ORDER AND THE FOLLOW-ON IS LOGICAL (E.G., IN TERMS OF

SCOPE, PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE, OR VALUE).

In accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) FAR 16.507-6(b)(2), the following requirement is being justified and approved as an exception to fair opportunity as “Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.”

NARA has built and is currently operating more than 20 major mission-critical, as well as other supporting, systems that are being hosted in both the AWS Commercial and GovCloud partitions. These applications are deployed in AWS and were designed to leverage AWS-specific programmatic provisioning capabilities, features, and services, in order to take full advantage of the unique capabilities of AWS Cloud Service Offerings (CSOs). In total through the life of these various mission-critical and supporting systems, more than 130 unique services (such as AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and CloudTrail) have been deeply integrated into NARA’s software architecture.

NARA’s enterprise security, compliance, and governance posture is rigidly anchored upon AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations. These proprietary tools provide unique capabilities for automated landing zones, centralized identity management, and mandatory Service Control Policies (SCPs) that enforce federal compliance mandates across all 20+ systems. These security architectures are proprietary to AWS and cannot be exported or translated 'out-of-the-box' to another cloud provider.

Cloud-native services lack native interoperability across different CSPs. Because NARA’s systems rely on AWS-specific APIs and managed services rather than generic virtual machines, migrating to another provider is not a simple 'lift-and-shift' operational effort. It would require complete architectural refactoring, essentially rewriting the core application code for many of those systems to match a competitor's proprietary APIs.

Refactoring and migrating these AWS-based systems to another cloud provider is neither technically or financially feasible at this time. With an annual AWS cloud spend of approximately $10 million, NARA estimates that a complete refactoring and data migration effort would introduce massive financial waste and catastrophic operational delays. NARA currently hosts more than 30 Petabytes (PB) of data within its AWS environment. Due to network throughput limitations, egress constraints, and data integrity verification protocols, it is estimated that migrating this 30PB archive alone to an alternate provider would require nearly 10 years to execute. Consequently, NARA would incur severe, duplicative operating costs for the nearly decade-long duration of this migration. Throughout any such migration period, NARA would still accrue ongoing AWS hosting and operational costs in upwards of $10 million/year to maintain mission continuity while simultaneously funding a second, parallel cloud contract to host and ingest the environment being built and transferred to another CSP.

This represents a minimum of nearly $100 million in duplicative operational baseline costs alone, excluding the multi-million dollar labor costs required for code re-engineering and engineering overhead.

Furthermore, if this requirement were subjected to periodic competition, NARA would be trapped in a perpetual, impossible cycle of migration. Because a complete data and system migration is estimated to take nearly 10 years, a duration that far exceeds the standard 5-year federal contract lifecycle, the Agency would be forced to initiate a subsequent re-competition and subsequent migration before the initial migration could ever be completed. This represents an unmanageable operational risk and a gross duplication of taxpayer funds that would not be recovered through competition.

Finally, NARA’s strategic roadmap explicitly requires future expansion into classified cloud enclaves, specifically at the Secret, Top Secret, and TS/SCI levels. To satisfy these requirements efficiently, NARA must utilize C2E to obtain these services from AWS. AWS is currently the unique provider capable of offering complete architectural, toolset, and operational parity across NARA's current Commercial/GovCloud footprint and the required Secret/Top Secret/SCI enclaves. Standardizing on AWS across all security echelons via C2E ensures a unified security architecture. It allows NARA engineers to write code once in an unclassified environment and seamlessly deploy it to classified enclaves using identical Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Splitting cloud providers across different security echelons would introduce severe security fragmentation, double the Agency’s administrative and training burdens on its limited resources, and completely break the cross-domain interoperability required to support NARA's future mission roadmap.

Accordingly, consideration of non-AWS cloud providers to support these workloads is neither technically feasible, operationally viable, nor in the best financial interest of the Government at this time.

V. A DETERMINATION BY THE CONTRACTING OFFICER THAT THE

ANTICIPATED COST TO THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE FAIR AND

REASONABLE.

Pricing for AWS services under C2E is based on a consolidated, tiered discount structure (Contract Discount Program) for both unclassified and classified spend that was negotiated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the IDIQ contract level. Based on anticipated annual consumption, NARA will fall under a “negotiated” discount tier which will enable NARA to secure the highest discounts AWS can offer under C2E. This Contract Discount Program is comparable to GSA’s newly negotiated OneGov pricing for the same unclassified cloud services available on AWS’ General Services Administration Multiple Award Schedule (GSA MAS) contract.

VI. ANY OTHER FACTS SUPPORTING THE JUSTIFICATION.

While the required brand name AWS cloud services can be procured through authorized resellers on a competitive basis, market research has indicated that utilizing C2E is the most suitable vehicle to meet the full scope of NARA requirements. C2E does not include resellers, and instead, only includes contracts directly with primary CSPs to streamline security, reduce costs, and simplify task order execution. Further, while resellers do exist on other vehicles such as GSA MAS and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) IV Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) that would enable NARA to compete for its brand name, commercial AWS hosting and professional services requirements, the nature of the requirements does not require any value-added reseller services. Therefore, even if NARA were to compete these brand name services among AWS authorized resellers, including small businesses, the resellers would not be performing any percentage of the hosting or professional services. Instead, it would result in a nearly 100% passthrough to AWS, with the exception of invoicing and minimal, ancillary administrative support services. Furthermore, market research has indicated that the anticipated discount structure being offered by AWS under C2E is comparable to current reseller discount programs, and will even offer additional savings over the proposed 10-year term of the task order.

VII. A STATEMENT OF THE ACTIONS, IF ANY, THE AGENCY MAY TAKE TO

REMOVE OR OVERCOME ANY BARRIERS THAT LED TO THE EXCEPTION TO

FAIR OPPORTUNITY BEFORE ANY SUBSEQUENT ACQUISITION FOR THE

SUPPLIES OR SERVICES IS MADE.

Although a majority of NARA’s critical applications currently reside in AWS, NARA also has active orders under its current BPA for both Azure and Google cloud hosting services and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning pilot initiatives. NARA will continue to leverage the offerings of other CSPs through separate acquisitions. In addition, NARA will continue to assess the capabilities of other CSPs, and will actively seek to procure cloud services and capabilities from other CSPs to meet specific mission needs through separate competitive and brand name acquisitions as required.

VIII. THE CONTRACTING OFFICER’S CERTIFICATION THAT THE JUSTIFICATION

IS ACCURATE AND COMPLETE TO THE BEST OF THE CONTRACTING

OFFICER’S KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF.

IX. EVIDENCE THAT ANY SUPPORTING DATA THAT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF

TECHNICAL OR REQUIREMENTS PERSONNEL (e.g., VERIFYING THE

GOVERNMENT’S MINIMUM NEEDS OR REQUIREMENTS OR OTHER

RATIONALE FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY) AND WHICH FORM

A BASIS FOR THE JUSTIFICATION HAVE BEEN CERTIFIED AS COMPLETE AND

ACCURATE BY THE TECHNICAL OR REQUIREMENTS PERSONNEL.

X. A WRITTEN DETERMINATION BY THE APPROVING OFFICIAL THAT ONE OF

THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN PARAGRAPHS (b)(1) THROUGH (6) OF FAR 16.507-6

APPLIES TO THE ORDER.