Synopsis_Solicitation_HQ0034-20-R-0264.pdf

Requirement Title: Domain Name System (DNS) Resolver Services

Solicitation Number: HQ0034-20-R-0264

Original Set Aside: None

Product Service Code: D399 – Other ADP and Telecommunications Services NAICS Code: 541519 – Other Computer Related Services

1. This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with the procedures of FAR subparts 12.6 and 13.5, as supplemented with additional information included in this notice.

2. This announcement constitutes the only solicitation for a written quote and a separate written solicitation will not be issued.

3. This solicitation is being issued as a Request for Quote (RFQ). The solicitation number HQ003420R0264.

4. This procurement is unrestricted. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for this acquisition is 541511. This procurement is unrestricted. The Government intends to award one firm-fixed price purchase order with two Option Years. Evaluation for this acquisition will be best value based on technical and price. This solicitation document and incorporated provisions and clauses are those in effect through Federal Acquisition Circular 2020-07 and Defense FAR Supplement Public Notice 20200605.

5. Please note that beta.sam.gov will be the primary source of information for this acquisition. Please direct any questions on this announcement to both points of contact listed on the beta.sam.gov notice by 30 July 2020 at 2:00 PM ET. Verbal questions will not be answered.

6. Technical Responses should not exceed 20 single-sided, 8 ½” x 11” pages with the font no smaller than 11 point. No facsimile will be accepted; only electronic documents will be accepted. It is the responsibility of the Offeror to verify that the contracting office has received the quote. The Government will not reimburse the contractor for any costs associated with preparing or substituting a response to this notice.

COMBINED SYNOPSIS/SOLICITATION

GENERAL INFORMATION

REQUIREMENT INFORMATION

https://www.beta.sam.gov/

Description:

Non-personal services to provide DNS resolver services that will enable the Department of Defense to detect, mitigate, and evolve with threats and provide users the best, first line of defense. The Department’s need for real-time DNS protection based on up-to-the-minute intelligence increased with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This effort will expand a pilot prototype that demonstrated the efficacy of a cloud-based, commercially-provided DNS resolver service for the Defense Information Network

(DoDIN). Seeking a modern approach, the DoD can leverage the threat intelligence curated and maintained by leading cyber security companies and stores logs in a secure, yet accessible data lake for analysis.

See Appendix 2 for the full Performance Scope of Work.

Services are to be performed off-site at the awardee’s place of business (see Appendix 2

– Performance Work Statement requirements).

Services are to be delivered to: Department of Defense, Washington Headquarters Service, Digital Defense Services, USA

(The below dates are subject to change dependent upon purchase order award) Base Year: 6 Sep 20 – 5 Sep 21

Line Item Description Quantity Unit of Measure

CLIN 0001 (Base Year) DNS Resolver Services 12 Month

CLIN 0002 (Base Year) Data Lake Services 12 Month

Option Year 1: 6 Sep 21 – 5 Sep 22

Line Item Description Quantity Unit of Measure

CLIN 1001 DNS Resolver Services 12 Month

CLIN 1002 Data Lake Services 12 Month

Option Year 2: 6 Sep 22 – 5 Sep 23

PLACE OF DELIVERY/PERFORMANCE/ACCEPTANCE/FOB POINT:

Line Item Description Quantity Unit of Measure

CLIN 2001 DNS Resolver Services 12 Month

CLIN 2002 Data Lake Services 12 Month

FAR provision 52.212-1, Instructions to Offerors -- Commercial, applies to this acquisition. As prescribed in FAR 12.301(b)(1), the following addendum is provided for this solicitation and hereby amends any language therein:

The provision at FAR 52.212-1, Instructions to Offerors - Commercial, applies to this acquisition. The following addendum applies to this provision:

FAR 52.212-1 Addendum

A. Multiple Offers. FAR 52.212-1(e) is deleted. The government shall award one, firm-fixed award.

B. Quotation Preparation Instructions: To assure timely and equitable evaluation of the quote, the Offeror must follow the instructions contained herein. Offerors are required to meet all solicitation requirements, including terms and conditions, and representations and certifications. Failure to meet a requirement may result in an offer being ineligible for award. Offerors must clearly identify any exception to the solicitation terms and conditions and provide complete accompanying rationale. The response shall consist of a singular email in PDF file format addressing Part I Administrative (in accordance with 52.212-1(b)) and Part II Technical Factor 1:

Written Technical Solutions Documentation (in accordance with section Evaluation Criteria C.I.).

C. Quotation Format: The following applies to quotation Parts I and II :

The quotes will be setup on US letter sized (8 ½” x 11”) pages except for charts, tables, or diagrams, which may not exceed 11” x 14”.

A page is defined as one face of a sheet of paper if it were printed and containing information

Text shall not be less than 11 point, Times New Roman font.

Pages in excess of the page limit shown below will not be evaluated.

In order to ensure receipt of your quote, please submit a copy of all quote parts via email to the government’s Primary and Secondary Points of Contact.

INSTRUCTIONS TO OFFERORS

Part Title File Type Page Count Part I Administrative PDF Unlimited Part II Technical Solution (See section Evaluation Criteria C.I.) PDF 20

The Contracting Officer has determined there is a high probability of adequate price competition for this acquisition. Upon examination of the offers, the Contracting Officer will review this determination and if adequate price competition exists, no additional cost information will be requested and certification under FAR 15.406-2 will not be required. However, if at any time during this evaluation the Contracting Officer determines that adequate price competition no longer exists; Offerors may be required to provide additional information, to the extent necessary, so that the government can determine that prices are fair and reasonableness and are commensurate with the Government’s need.

(End of FAR 52.212-1 Addendum)

A. BASIS FOR AWARD

An award will be made based on the best overall (i.e., best value) quote submission that is determined to be the most beneficial to the Government, with appropriate consideration given to the following evaluation Factors:

Technical Factor 1: Written Technical Solutions Documentation, Technical Factor 2: Technical Usability Demonstration and

Price

By submission of its offer in accordance with the instructions provided in clause FAR 52.212-1, Instructions to Offerors, the Offeror accedes to the terms of this solicitation.

To receive consideration for award, all base factors must be achieved for Technical Factor 1. Offerors who meet the base factors for Technical Factor 1 will be invited to present a demo of their solution via an in-person of virtual meeting with the government evaluators. Offerors are cautioned that any resulting award may not necessarily be made to the lowest Price offered or the most highly rated Technical submission.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Note--a best value award decision does not mean that the Government will automatically make award to a higher priced, technically acceptable proposal. Instead, the Source Selection Authority will make an award decision that represents the best value to the Government in accordance with the basis in Paragraph B, even if that means awarding to a lower priced, technically acceptable proposal.

B. FACTORS TO BE EVALUATED

52.212-2 EVALUATION--COMMERCIAL ITEMS (a) The Government will award a contract resulting from this solicitation to the responsible Offeror whose offer conforming to the solicitation will be most advantageous to the Government, price and other factors considered.

C. EVALUATION APPROACH

All proposals shall be subject to evaluation by a team of United States Government (USG) personnel. The proposal will be evaluated strictly in accordance with its content.

Quotes which merely restate the requirement, or state that the requirement will be met without providing supporting rationale, are not sufficient. Offerors who fail to meet the minimum requirements of the solicitation will be rated Unacceptable and thus, ineligible for award.

I. TECHNICAL EVALUATION APPROACH. The evaluation process will consider the following:

1) TECHNICAL FACTOR 1: WRITTEN TECHNICAL SOLUTION

DOCUMENT

This documentation must include a description of the following technical details:

Service topology drawing.

Continuity plan or capabilities description to facilitate 5-9s availability.

Solution auto-scaling capabilities.

Data lake storage and export details.

Allow-list and blocklist walkthrough via GUI and API.

Hierarchical or group/organization based allow/block listing.

DNSSEC evaluation and blocking options.

Documentation for the last 24 months covering records processed, service uptime, time to resolution (query time), and DNSSEC failures (on domains which Offerors provide authoritative DNSSEC).

The Government will evaluate the Offeror’s Technical Factor 1 submission to determine whether it provides all of the below-listed required capabilities requirements. The Government will also evaluate the Offeror’s demonstrated record of uptime. The minimum capabilities an Offeror is required to provide are:

a) Provide global DNS resolution service

i) Be able to support up to 400 million queries a day at launch with ability to scale up to 3 billion queries.

ii) Maintain 99.999% uptime for all users of the DNS resolver service

iii) Support UDP53, TCP53, DoH and DoT as desired.

b) Provide cloud based data lake for logging full DNS query and response packet data

i) Data lake will be cloud based

ii) Maintain 99.99% uptime for all users of the data lake service

iii) Data lake will use a non-proprietary storage format (CSV, Parquet, etc.)

iv) Data lake segmented and restricted for customer organizations to access only their data

v) Data Lake allows for identified USG entities to access all stored data

vi) The entire solution can be accredited at FedRamp High or

IL-4 within 30 days of contract award. This includes all components of the solution (including but not limited to the resolver, data lake platform/analytic capability and control interface).

vii) Data lake services will have documentation in place that explains all data fields

viii) Must be possible to extract all data from data lake in a non-proprietary format

ix) Data is transferable to other data lake providers

x) Data is fully-owned by the USG

c) Utilize threat intelligence to allow/deny domain resolutions

i) Provide blocking and allowing capabilities via GUI front end and API

ii) Provide the ability to override these with lists of blocked and allowed domains at the enterprise level

iii) Provide the ability to override these with allow/deny at the local (i.e., customer organizations) level

iv) Provide the ability to add custom threat feeds in a programmatic manner

v) Provide the ability to deny domain resolution for failed Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) validation

vi) Provide custom block page with Tier 1 support information specific to each customer organization

vii) Allow/deny capability is provided at the individual, customer organization level for their query traffic

viii) Master-level allow/deny capability is provided at the enterprise level for the entire solution

d) 24/7/365 cuistomer support and helpdesk capabilities

i) Interface directly with customer organizations to support onboarding to services

ii) Troubleshoot as needed to resolve USG customer issues within predefined time frames (2 hours max).

iii) Written documentation and standard training materials

(such as video tutorials, handbooks, how-to sites, etc.) on how to operate and maintain all components of the service.

After the Government completes evaluation of each Technical Factor 1 Capabilities Document Submission, Offerors that do not meet the minimum requirements will be ineligible for further consideration. Offerors that do meet the requirements will receive a notification advising them to proceed to Technical Factor 2: Technical Usability Demonstration.

2) TECHNICAL FACTOR 2: TECHNICAL USABILITY DEMONSTRATION

Technical Factor 2 will be evaluated to determine the extent to which the solution proposed in Technical Factor 1 is workable. Solution will be evaluated on how well user can accomplish a given task in a reasonable amount of time and with minimal cognitive strain. Offerors will need to demonstrate their ability to meet each of the below requirements with their proposed solution, walking the government evaluators through how each requirement would be completed using an in-production service, a prototype, or wireframes. Offerors will need to demonstrate how each of the following requirements are achieved:

a) A non-government organization is approved by DDS to use services and needs to direct all queries to the Offeror’s DNS resolver service;

b) Organizational customer of services needs to allow access to a domain blocked at the enterprise level;

c) DDS needs enterprise level blocking for a list of new domains;

d) Customer organization needs to see why a domain was blocked and the source of threat intelligence that led to that determination;

e) DDS needs to see the number of blocked queries for each customer organization;

f) Customer organization needs to change their Tier 1 phone number on the block page specific to their users;

g) A third-party government organization (e.g., DARPA) needs to query the number of query attempts made by an identified command and control exploit.

The government will evaluate the Offerors ability to meet each of the above requirements during the demonstration. The government will also evaluate the proposed solution from a user-centered design/human factors perspective.

Offerors that are determined by the government to be viable competitors based on technical Factor 1: Written Technical Solution Document and based on their performance in Technical Factor 2: Technical Usability Demonstration will be notified to complete Factor 3: Price.

3. PRICE EVALUATION APPROACH

The Government will evaluate price by adding the total of all line item prices, including all options. The total evaluated price will be that sum. The

Government will adjust the Offeror’s proposed Total Evaluated Price (TEP) if mathematical errors are identified. The Contracting Officer has determined there is a high probability of adequate price competition for this procurement. Upon examination of offers, the Contracting Officer will review this determination and if adequate price competition exists, no additional price information will be requested. However, if at any time during this evaluation the Contracting Officer determines that adequate price competition no longer exists; Offerors may be required to submit information to the extent necessary for a determination of price fair and reasonableness to be made.

The TEP is calculated by adding together the base price and all option period pricing. An Offeror's proposed prices will be determined by multiplying the quantities identified in the Price Template by the unit price for each item to confirm the extended amount for each.

The Government intends to award a contract without any additional communication with respective Offerors. The Government reserves the right to conduct discussions if deemed in its best interest. The Government also reserves the right to cancel the solicitation without making award.

(End of provision)

See attached Appendix 1_ Provisions and Clauses_ HQ00342R0264

CLAUSES AND PROVISIONS

Appendix 1_ Provisions and Clauses

Appendix 2_Performance Work Statement

ATTACHMENTS