Science Applications International Corp. won a $1.3 billion single-source contract from the U.S. Department of Treasury to manage the agency’s various cloud-computing services that support secure IT goals.
The contract will be in effect for seven years, SAIC said in a statement provided to Federal Times.
This “T-Cloud” contract allows SAIC to coordinate access to cloud services for the whole department instead of having different Treasury offices spin off their own solutions, a strategy that the department said wasn’t cost-effective, Federal Times previously reported.
This award marks a step forward for the Treasury in meeting the White House’s expectations that federal agencies improve the efficiency of their technology, especially in the wake of recent ransomware attacks affecting governments across the country.
Bob Genter, president of the defense and civilian sector at SAIC, told Federal Times in a statement that the Treasury will use this technology to make the adoption other cloud services accessible.
A 2021 executive order said the federal government “must … accelerate movement to secure cloud services,” and since then, various roadmaps have been devised for agencies to do so, though migration has been patchwork.
According to SAIC’s 2023 report, federal spending on cloud services is increasing by an average of $1.6 billion per year.
In a February report, the Treasury said its approach to the White House’s direction would involve an award that would benefit the entire agency, not just one office. That kind of a multi-cloud environment, it said, would reduce operating burden on its bureaus and consolidate disparate data and workloads in one place.
“Much of Treasury’s IT infrastructure is housed in on-premises data centers that limit the ability to quickly adjust IT resources to support changing or new mission requirements,” according to the 2020 request for information. “Treasury recognizes the current on-premises infrastructure cannot adapt quickly enough to Bureau demand.”
Cloud adoption is also likely to accelerate closures of brick-and-mortar data centers. In 10 years, Treasury closed almost half of its 61 centers.
“T-Cloud will enable the Treasury Department to rapidly and securely adopt a modern, flexible and cost-effective approach to utilizing and consuming data in the cloud,” said Genter in a statement.
As part of the award, SAIC will also assist the department with business support and transition services.
SAIC, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, provides IT services to civilian and military agencies of the U.S federal government. From 2021 to 2023, about 98% of its total revenue came from federal contracts, on which the government spends a total of about $600 billion each year. About half of that revenue came from non-Pentagon agencies, according to its latest annual report.
The company earns roughly $7.7 billion in annual revenue.
Molly Weisner is a staff reporter for Federal Times where she covers labor, policy and contracting pertaining to the government workforce. She made previous stops at USA Today and McClatchy as a digital producer, and worked at The New York Times as a copy editor. Molly majored in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
