Answers to Questions IT-24-0063 1.17.24.pdf

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

IT-24-0063

17 January 2024

1. Are there specific past performance requirements for subcontractors?

a. It has not been determined if the solicitation will have past performance.

2. What level of accreditation is envisioned for the cloud environment?

a. Our focus is with using FEDRAMP approved capabilities, where we can fully examine the controls and obtain our Authority to Operate (ATO), if the capability aligns with Census mission and security needs.

3. Would the Government prefer a vendor cloud hosting solution that is FedRAMP authorized to support ATO requirements?

a. The existing solutions in the RFI are Census "hosted" and managed. Those must be supported with the ability to evolve Census capabilities over time, using the most appropriate and secure solutions available to support the mission.

4. What scope of hybrid/on=premises support is expected to be performed by the vendor for this contract?

a. The scope is to assist in supporting the on-premises environment via the services references in the RFI, in addition to supporting the planning of migration activities and cloud engineering and support. The Contractor will not be responsible for Operations and Maintenance of either the On-Premises or Cloud Environments

5. Will the 4,000 servers be migrated on a separate contract?

a. This contract provides strategy and planning in support of migration efforts.

Actual Migration will be performed on another contract.

6. Is it determined who will be migrating the 4,000 servers?

a. Not at this time

7. Where will the work be performed for this contract?

a. Via remote work, the Bowie Data Center, Suitland HQ. This also may entail travel to Regional Offices as needed.

8. On p. 2, Bullet 3, USCB writes: “Establish uniform management tools and practices to streamline governance and management across a multi-cloud/hybrid environment.”

Question: What management tools and practices to streamline governance and management across its multi-cloud/hybrid environment is USCB currently using?

a. Census Secure Cloud Team works with other internal entities to provide Governance, including the analysis and selection of tools we use to manage the environment. Some tools are cloud native and some hybrid depending on multiple factors such as security, cost and supportability/usability. Hybrid Cloud tools include Apptio Cloudability for FinOps, Terraform for Infrastructure as Code, Morpheus for Orchestration. Our Services that need to support both On Premise and Hybrid Cloud deployments include monitoring, file level backup and restore.

9. On p. 4, Section entitled “Process Automation," USCB lists various tool categories.

Question: Can USCB provide details on what tools are used for the various sub-bullets, such as Business Case Analysis, Portfolio Tracking, and RPA?

a. a. USCB is currently evaluating multiple options and cannot provide a definitive answer at this time.

10. General question: Given the cybersecurity nature of the effort, what is the anticipated role for (or anticipated integration with) the current Census Enterprise Cybersecurity Support Services (ECSS) contractor at USCB?

a. The Contractor will be expected to collaborate with the Office of Information Security (OIS) and parties that support that office.

11. On p. 6, Bullet 6, USCB writes: "Ensure the Contractor’s Key Personnel meet all requirements identified in Section H." Question: Can USCB please elaborate on this Key Personnel requirements, or share section H?

a. USCB has not finalized its Key Personnel Requirements

12. Regarding Question 6.a in the posted Q&A - could the Government please confirm that the intent is to migrate all 4,000 on-prem servers to the cloud? Further, could the Government please provide more details on size and complexity of this requirement, such as how many devices & types of devices to migrate (per Question 7 of the posted Q&A), and the average size of the on-prem servers to be migrated?

a. Our intent is to migrate as much as is feasible and cloud appropriate to the cloud, in alignment with our key business initiatives which require cloud capabilities.

We expect some use cases will not be cloud appropriate.

b. USCB cannot provide additional details of the current devices beyond those provided in Previous Answers.

c. The USCB Data Center has approximately 4000 on-premises servers running the following Operating Systems:

i. RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX

ii. SOLARIS

iii. VMWARE

1. ESX 4i

2. ESX 6.x

3. vSphere 6.x Enterprise Plus

iv. WINDOWS SERVER

d. USCB is seeking to migrate to the Big 3 CSPs

13. Attachment 1, under IT O&M Support subsection, has O&M and Migration in scope.

However, Question 7 of the posted Q&A states that neither will be in scope. More generally, the overview of the scope provided in the second half of the first paragraph of the RFI solicitation document appears to be lesser in scope compared to that outlined in Attachment 1. Could the Government please reconcile this incongruity?

a. Attachment 1 has been updated to remove the reference to IT O&M Support

14. Can the government please clarify if the below are part of scope: 1) Cloud Migration, 2) O&M in Cloud, and 3) O&M in Datacenter?

a. Cloud Migration – Not in Scope

b. O&M in Cloud – Not in Scope

c. O&M in Datacenter – Not in Scope

15. Could the Government please clarify if it has any preferences between the three big

CSPs? Further, does the Government prefer a multi-cloud solution? If so, why?

a. Census has current environments and solutions required to support our near-term goals. Those must be supported with the ability to evolve Census capabilities over time, using the most appropriate and secure solutions available to support the mission.

Revised 17 January 2024 Overview

The United States Census Bureau (USCB) is the federal government’s largest statistical agency and exists to answer simple and complex questions about the people, places and economy of the nation and we have historically answered those questions by doing censuses and surveys. Federal law protects the confidentiality of all the information the USCB collects. Maintaining the trust and privacy of customers and survey respondents is a critical part of the USCB’s continued success.

The information age continues to present opportunities and imperatives to transform data science and statistical methodologies across the federal statistical system. The key role played by Census in the statistical community requires innovation and transformation. As the USCB charts a bold vision for the future where data science practices are as distributed as the data itself, we know that technology is the critical ingredient of the transformation underway to remain as the leader of the statistical community. To achieve this goal, the USCB is focused on providing robust, flexible, rapid, integrated and secure Information Technology (IT) solutions to enable geographically dispersed statisticians, data scientists, other census staff and our partners to perform complex calculations and analysis using a combination of internal and external data sources, censuses, and surveys to produce near real-time data products and estimates critical to the nation’s people, places and economy. This data-centric approach will be agile and flexible to support the evolving, global data sources and optimized designs of censuses and surveys.

Migrating to the secure cloud and reducing our reliance on an on-premise infrastructure is critical to the USCB modern, robust and innovative technology services that include integrated enterprise support and cybersecurity protections.

Census Objectives

The US Census Bureau provides a cloud infrastructure critical to the migration from on premise to native secure cloud multi cloud/hybrid environment to support the data-centric future of the USCB and our stakeholders. This vehicle will provide Foundational standards to support the transformational effort that will optimize surveys and leverage the unprecedented abundance of data to provide the timely, high-quality products expected from the premier federal statistical organization.

To shift in the direction of a data and data-product focus, the USCB has created four integrated enterprise-wide initiatives – the four pillars of the new Business Ecosystem to provide the cloud compute and cloud services for the components of the business ecosystem for Census Central Information Technology support.

SCOPE OF WORK

The USCB Secure Cloud Team (SCT) provides support for the secure cloud as the foundation of the enterprise initiatives and the data-centric business ecosystem. Establishing foundational standards for computing capabilities, processes, and roadmaps focused on the integrated planning and control of the UCSB migration to the cloud are essential to the support of the Enterprise initiatives. These enterprise foundational standards, processes and roadmaps will provide guidelines and policies for the USCB enterprise architecture that will align to and enable applicable operational and transformation and migration, such as the integrated roadmap for the Core Business Ecosystem initiatives and the roadmaps for censuses and surveys including the 2027 Economic Census, the many demographic and economic surveys conducted by the USCB every year, as well as the 2030 Census.

These foundational computing capabilities will be used across the bureau's directorates to support our mission to modernize IT, provide architecting solutions for the cloud, establish enterprise technical processes for cloud migration and for decommissioning applications from on-premises once they migrate to the cloud. The Contractor shall provide Operational Standards, processes, planning, review and assessment guidelines, and address the challenges of moving current Census applications/systems to the cloud.

A collection of skilled cloud engineers and solution architects are required to provide USCB with the expertise to develop enterprise standards, architecture plans, operation plans, application assessments and migration planning services processes to support the SCT migration work to the USCB to the native secure cloud and reduce the Census on prem infrastructure.

Secure Cloud Enterprise Standards Framework

The Contractor shall be responsible to do a full assessment of the Census Enterprise and development and implement a Census-wide Secure Cloud Enterprise Standards Framework with processes and standards for the Census Bureau’s Enterprise. The Contractor shall, provide the following support:

• Provide technical expertise, capabilities and services to accelerate the USCB migration to secure cloud services and adoption of a zero-trust architecture.

• Develop governance standards for the USCB for the development and refactoring of applications using a zero-trust architecture and targeting cloud native services.

• Establish uniform management tools and practices to streamline governance and management across a multi-cloud/hybrid environment.

• Develop standards for network setup, landing zone setup, and the migration of users, data, and servers.

• Develop Migration planning strategies and procedures which include numerous application and system dependencies, as well as network bandwidth constraints that may limit migration options for some systems.

• Develop standards for Installation of new security zones and tools in Azure/AWS, as well as any new Cloud Service Providers adopted at USCB and Installation of new database servers and a new instance of Citrix to support remote users.

• Develop Amazon Web Services (AWS) development, testing, code quality, system monitoring, and management of Agile software development standard processes.

• Develop and configure environment standards for enterprise application for DHA (Software as a service (SaaS) and migrate the data in the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment Standards.

• Develop migration standards of all systems and data into the Census Bureau cloud environment, including virtual servers and applications, including procedures for how to recode or modify applications to be cloud compliant, in accordance with the Census cloud migration timelines.

• Develop process standards to support sustainment of the cloud environment, monitoring and maintaining optimum cloud performance and reliability across all cloud infrastructures.

• Develop Enterprise Standards for cloud-based managed service hosting procedures for FedRAMP authorization at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Platform as a Service (PaaS), to monitor all application at PaaS including but not limited to developing, maintaining an Application Operational Status Board for the SCT, and providing end-use notifications for applications.

• Develop Migration Planning Services processes from available data from systems of records.

• Establish Application Assessment Surveys (AS) and Technical Interchange Meetings (TIM) to access the cloud migration readiness of Census applications and document recommendations in an Assessment Memorandum (AM).

• Assist USCB in the development and preparation of Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) and Enterprise Information Technology Service Questionnaires and review.

• Conduct After Action Reviews (AARs) to capture lessons learned and incorporate feedback and historical experience into future revisions of the Migration Planning Service process.

• Create migration prerequisite standards and policies for compliance with migration prerequisites which includes kickoffs, reviews of process milestones, schedule, duties and responsibilities.

• Work with the USCB SCT to develop enterprise standards and processes for how to plan, setup, migrate, go-live, and decommission of physical and virtual servers from the Bowie Data Center. This includes both FISMA High and FISMA Moderate systems for multi-cloud/hybrid environments. The migration included Domain Controllers, print servers, database servers (Oracle and SQL Server), application servers, file servers, Certificate Authority, Redhat Satellite Server, Security Operations Center (SOC) Servers, Citrix Servers, and about a half dozen public web sites.

• Develop enterprise standards to engage customers and support programs to assess compliance and migration prerequisites including ATO and Security packages.

• Provide subject matter experts to develop standards and processes for industry best practices for AWS Cloud engineering, Robotic Process Automation and AI/ML analysis for architecting the AWS environment to include creating standard data ingest and application development platforms for USCB Enterprise to use.

• Develop a common Software Development Framework (SDF) based on Agile DevSecOps best practices.

• Identify, incorporate, and develop cloud security governance elements such as storage, scalability, user support, and security SCA controls and assessments that need to evolve to support cloud based, service based continuous ATO type environment as the agency transitions from on prem to a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment.

SOFTWARE/SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE SUPPORT

The Contractor shall provide software/systems development life cycle support for the following:

• Legacy system sustainment and operations

• SDLC: Agile DevSecOps, Kanban, Extreme Programming or Hybrid Application development, modernization and operations and maintenance

• User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) design

• Algorithm development

• Data / statistical analysis, data conversion and migration

• Cloud migration

• Automated Test, Evaluation, IV&V

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

The Contractor shall provide systems engineering support for the following:

• Systems Engineering Lifecycle Support

• Business Process Reengineering

• Model based systems engineering (MBSE)

• Enterprise architecture

• Strategic planning

• Technology roadmaps

• Hardware Engineering

Process Automation

The Contractor shall provide process automation support to include the following:

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

• Low code development – Appian

• Automated workflow tools (SaaS) hosted in AWS for:

o Business Case Analysis (BCA) o Analysis of Hosting Alternatives for hybrid cloud o Portfolio tracking and application assessments.

o ITIL and Agile maturity asses

Technology Modernization

The Contractor shall provide Technology Modernization support to include the following:

• Research/Analysis of alternatives / Trade Studies

• Data analytics, predictive analytics, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning

IT O&M Support

The Contractor shall provide IT O&M Support to include the following:

• Data Center Operations and Maintenance

• Cloud Engineering (AWS, Azure, OnPrem, DISA, Hybrid)

• Digital Modernization

• Helpdesk based on ITIL frame.

Secure Cloud Enterprise Framework Team Contract Program Management Support

The Contractor shall provide program management support to include the following:

• Integrated project/program management

• Configuration Management

• Budget, Financial Management

• Outreach

• Logistics

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT & CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

Overall management of services and support provided under this contract is considered a critical function. The Contractor shall provide overall program and contract management to ensure efficient and effective accomplishment of work across all task areas. The Contractor shall implement and execute effective management in a manner which reduces the risk of schedule delays and cost overruns, decreases the likelihood and impact of negative risks and issues on the program, and increases the ability to communicate and share information with the USCB, other Contractors, and stakeholders.

Program management support shall be provided in alignment with the industry standards for program and project management (e/g. PMBOK, Agile and Scrum).

At a minimum, program and contract management includes the following types of support:

• Develop, implement, and assist with planning, direction, execution, and oversight of Task Area activities and workflow.

• Develop, deliver, maintain, and adhere to program and contract management reporting requirements.

• Conduct daily operational management, leadership, and oversight to ensure requirements are met within schedule, cost, scope, and performance standards.

• Coordinate consistent collaboration and communication among the Contracting Officer (CO), Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) and Alternate Contracting Officer’s Representative (ACOR), Technical Points of Contact (TPoCs), USCBCSvD staff, program areas, other Contractors, and business partners as defined in the contract.

• Track, mitigate, and report on risks and address any issues prior to escalation.

• Acknowledge, respond, and manage contractual support under issued Technical

Directives (TDs);

• Support USCB’s responses to OIG, GAO, OMB, Congress, Department of Commerce, other governing bodies, and internal sources data call reporting requests and requirements.

• Actively manage and coordinate the onboarding and termination of Contractor personnel.

• Ensure the Contractor’s Key Personnel meet all requirements identified in Section H.

• Compile and present measurements and metrics, as requested and agreed upon with

Government Representatives, for regular reporting and detailing the support services performed that add value to meeting strategic goals.

• Assist in arranging, conducting, and documenting meetings, briefings, and presentations, as required or requested.

• Perform incoming and outgoing transitional planning and execution of incumbent/successor contract support to include knowledge transfer and information sharing.

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT & CONTRACT MANAGEMENT