Cloud Interconnect Services and Support

This contract is to acquire secure, high-speed direct connections from the FDA to the CSPs via of an ICSP. The acquisition will include the network circuits that connect FDA data centers to the Interconnect Service Provider data centers, Interconnect Service, technical support, and professional services to install, configure, test, and deploy the Interconnect Service to production. The FDA data centers include Ashburn Data Center (ADC) and White Oak Data Center (WODC). This contract will enable FDA to:

• Fulfill security controls for the AWS GovCloud to operate under FISMA high categorization; FISMA high categorization requires high availability (HA), and HA is one of the benefits of the Interconnect Service.
• Increase network performance and reduce latency issues between the FDA network and CSPs; the Interconnect Service enables real-time access to cloud resources and services
• Provide increase network bandwidth needed to migrate large applications and to transfer large data sets from FDA on-premise data centers to the cloud in high speed
• Provide secure connections to the CSPs which comply with all Federal cloud computing regulations and security standards that are specified in Section 3.1; improve security by by-passing the public internet with a direct connection to the CSPs
• Support the monitoring and inspection of cloud traffic between the FDA network and the CSPs
• Increase communication reliability since faster data transfers with high-speed connections are less vulnerable to system timeouts.
• Facilitate Disaster Recovery (DR) with high speed direct and simultaneous connections to multiple CSPs that are geographically distributed across the Continental United States (CONUS)
• Minimize resources required to acquire, implement, and manage individual connections from the FDA to each CSP
• Extend the FDA network infrastructure footprint with greater reach and flexibility to manage network resources in the ICSP infrastructure facilities/data centers
• Increase security and performance through direct connections that are more secure and reliable, and have lower latency than public internet connections
• Provide on-demand provisioning of connections to multiple CSPs

. Awarded Vendors: EQUINIX INC. Contract Award Dollar Amount: $1,093,537.32. Contract Award Date: 2019-08-21.