RFI 2025-10.docx

VITA RFI 2025-10

COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA

VIRGINIA IT AGENCY (VITA)

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT DIVISION

7325 BEAUFONT SPRINGS DR

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA 23225

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) 2025-10

FOR:

Cloud Services

NOTE: This public body does not discriminate against faith-based organizations in accordance with the Code of Virginia, §2.2-4343.1 or against a Supplier because of race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other basis prohibited by state law relating to discrimination in employment.

VITA is committed to increasing procurement opportunities for small, women-owned, and minority-owned (SWaM) businesses, strengthening the Commonwealth’s overall economic growth through the development of its IT suppliers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. PRESENT SITUATION

3. SUBMISSION PROCESS

4. QUESTIONS

5. CONTACT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

The intent of this Request for Information (RFI) is solely to gather information. Information received is intended to be used for informational and planning purposes as VITA plans a related potential procurement. Virginia law grants public bodies wide discretion is determining whether to move forward with a procurement. See, e.g., Va. Code § 2.2-4319. Accordingly, nothing in this RFI may be construed as a commitment or promise to solicit or procure a solution. Responding to the RFI is not a pre-requisite to submitting a proposal for any subsequent procurement should a formal solicitation be issued.

VITA and the Commonwealth of Virginia will not pay for any information herein requested and provided by Supplier. VITA and the Commonwealth of Virginia will not be liable for any costs incurred by the Supplier related to this RFI. All such costs are Supplier’s sole responsibility.

Following receipt of responses to this RFI, VITA may contact some respondents and schedule clarification meetings to gain additional understanding.

a) Public Availability/Inspection of Records Received in Response to this RFI The information received in response to this RFI is intended to be used for planning and budgetary purposes in support of a potential Request for Proposal (RFP). VITA intends to make responses to the RFI available for public inspection after the potential RFP has concluded and a contract has been awarded. VITA intends to use pricing information submitted in response to this RFI as part of its internal cost estimates; accordingly, per Virginia Code §2.2-4342(B), pricing information received in response to this RFI shall not be open to public inspection.

Pursuant to Virginia Code § 2.2-4342(F), trade secrets or proprietary information submitted by a Supplier in connection with a procurement transaction shall not be required to be released under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (Va. Code § 2.2-3700 et seq.) so long as the Supplier:

· invokes the protections of § 2.2-4342(F) in writing prior to or upon submission of the data or other materials,

· identifies specifically the data or other materials to be protected, and

· states the reasons why protection is necessary.

The Supplier should submit a completed Administrative Appendix E (Supplier Proprietary Information) with its proposal that specifies the exact items in the Supplier’s response that the Suppler deems proprietary or trade secret information and the reason it deems that specific information as proprietary or trade secret.

b) Purpose of this RFI This RFI seeks insights from qualified suppliers with experience in cloud services management and optimization on behalf of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA). Areas of interest include whether suppliers operate as single-provider specialists or as platform-agnostic managed service providers capable of supporting a multi-cloud environment. VITA is also interested in the FinOps tools and practices suppliers use to deliver cost visibility, accountability, and optimization, including cost allocation and tagging frameworks, anomaly detection, rightsizing recommendations, commitment management (reserved instances and savings plans), and reporting or chargeback capabilities. Responses to this RFI will inform VITA's understanding of the current cloud services market and support future procurement planning.

PRESENT SITUATION

The Commonwealth of Virginia’s Server, Storage, and Data Center (SSDC) Tower is a core pillar of statewide IT operations, supporting 67 agencies across on‑premises data centers, private cloud environments, and three major public cloud platforms (Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP, and Oracle’s OCI). The current delivery model provides extensive responsibilities including data center facility management, server and storage operations, public cloud services, database administration, network services, disaster recovery, backup operations, and hybrid Identity and Access Management. These services are delivered within a highly diverse and complex ecosystem of agency-specific environments, applications, and varying levels of technology maturity.

There are several opportunities to mature the SSDC Tower based on lessons learned:

· There are friction points where supplier responsibilities overlap or interfere with each other in VITA’s Multi-Supplier Integrated (MSI) model of service delivery. Multiple suppliers provide public cloud service offerings, manage different portions of the Commonwealth’s Identity Fabric, and are responsible for the security of various platforms. Guardrails are not always well-defined in Service Management Manuals, Operating Level Agreements, and vendor contracts.

· Each agency has their own hardware and software requirements, applications, and various levels of technical capabilities. Agencies have limited IT budgets and must carefully evaluate what efforts to fund. SSDC must make sure modernization efforts create positive business value to gain traction with Agencies.

· Many SSDC functions require manual processing (provisioning/de-provisioning, etc.) and have limited self-service options.

· The Commonwealth’s Disaster Recovery model is an “all or nothing” solution where the entire ecosystem must be brought down in order to restore functionality to any one failing system. Individual agency and application-level DR capabilities are not supported.

· Cloud service adoption is not uniform across platforms. Agencies that use AWS leverage it in different ways than agencies that use GCP. Not all native cloud services for all platforms have been approved for use in the Commonwealth, creating a variance in offerings for the SSDC supplier to manage.

There is limited visibility into SSDC metrics such as on-premises server and storage utilization, cloud adoption, financial forecasting, etc. Reporting and auditing capabilities are hampered by a lack of unified dashboards.

For more information about VITA, please see https://www.vita.virginia.gov/about/ Link to current SSDC contract

SUBMISSION PROCESS

· One electronic copy of complete submission

· One electronic copy of submission, with redactions of proprietary information

· One electronic copy of Completed Appendix E

QUESTIONS

Section 1 – Organizational Capability and Experience

1. Please describe your organization’s experience serving as a Cloud Services provider in complex, public-sector or regulated environments.

2. Please describe your corporate investment (completed over the last two years and planned for the next 1 year) with this operational model, in terms of investment in people and the solution.

3. Who are some of your most complex or comparable clients (by size, scope, or governance)? What strategic challenges did they face, and how did you help address them? How did your approach reduce the risk profile?

4. What are some of the smaller clients you’ve supported in this capacity? How small were they and what was your role

5. Please provide up to three anonymized case studies that demonstrate your company’s ability to perform Cloud Services.

6. How do you structure Cloud Services operations?

Section 2 – Strategic Questions

7. How are Cloud Services platform operations typically structured and staffed in government environments? What delivery models (federated, centralized, hybrid) have proven most successful and why? What are the criteria that drive the decision?

8. How is shared responsibility structured in a delivery model that involves multiple parties?

9. What incentives most effectively drive “right sizing” Cloud usage?

10. For state government customers of comparable scale, what does typical utilization actually look like — compute rightsizing, storage tiering, commitment coverage? And where do public sector customers most commonly leave money on the table?

11. What are other customers with multiple cloud service providers and centralized service delivery doing? How are the relationships structured? What are the pros and cons of each relationship structure?

12. Do you see datacenter and cloud services as best handled together or separately? What reasons support your answer?

13. What tools does your company typically use to support Cloud Services?

14. Given our MSI structure, what kind of FinOps have your seen work best? What are some platforms/ tools that you have seen work best? How are pricing models typically structured for this technology?

15. Given the MSI model that the Commonwealth utilizes, what type of application workloads do you see as optimal for migrating to cloud as opposed to running on-prem? What workloads have proven to be difficult in this model?

16. Considering the multi-cloud model followed by the COV, would you recommend using an abstraction layer to manage resources and workload portability across cloud environments? What reasons support your answer?

17. What do typical governance models look like for managed public cloud services in a public-private partnership relationship such as the COVs?

Section 3 – Financials, Timeline, and Transition

18. What are the typical cost drivers for Cloud Services? Please describe any variables that influence cost.

19. What are typical models for licensing of Cloud Services and consumption?

20. Aside from discounts from list price/consumption model, are there other pricing mechanisms/structures that are used in the market that VITA should consider?

21. How do you see increases in hyperscaler power costs impacting Cloud computing pricing in the next five years?

22. What does a typical pricing model look like when one supplier is managing both the server, storage & data center scope of responsibilities and the managed cloud services scope of responsibilities?

23. Based on your experience, how do you see total costs changing as customers migrate their workloads from the data center to managed cloud?

24. What are service level agreements that are typical when one supplier manages both the server, storage & data center services as well as the managed public cloud services and migration/ modernization work?

25. What service levels are typical in the current market when a supplier manages only server, storage and data center services work?

26. What service levels are typical in the current market when a supplier manages only managed public cloud services work?

27. What should the COV be planning and preparing for when transitioning to a new supplier/ contract? What are some lesson learned from implementations with some of your other customers with similar structure and scale?

28. What do typical transition timelines (from incumbent to new supplier) look like for a contract of the COV’s size and scale?

Section 4 – Final Clarifications

29. What specific information should VITA provide to enable you to deliver a complete and accurate response to an RFP, and a successful transition and implementation plan? Please list required data, architectural inputs, license documentation, etc.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Please provide your company’s contact information.

Company Name

Company Mailing Address

Company Website Address

Name of Contact Person

Contact Person E-mail Address

Contact Person Telephone #

Headquarters location

Thank you for responding to this Request for Information.

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