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U.S. General Services Administration has awarded a consulting contract for developing and implementing the government’s strategy to increase the amount of cloud-based services federal agencies use to Arlington, Va.-based eGlobalTech, according to an announcement the contractor made Monday.
The announcement came about two weeks after federal CIO Vivek Kundra outlined his vision for reducing inefficiencies in the way U.S. government procures IT capacity by identifying services that can be outsourced to private cloud service providers instead of building out government-owned infrastructure.
“Our firm will assist GSA in defining the overall technical roadmap and strategy for cloud computing and facilitating collaboration across agencies to achieve the strategic vision,” eGlobalTech President Sonya Jain said in a statement. “We will work with GSA to not only define the strategic and technical roadmap but to assist in overall program execution.”
Services the contractor said it would provide to the agency include assistance with defining requirements and business rules for the government’s existing “cloud computing storefront” apps.gov. The portal was launched on the same day Kundra made his announcement at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Apps.gov is a Web-based interface between government agencies and private contractors that offer IT capacity as a service.
eGlobalTech will also conduct market research to guide GSA’s purchasing decisions, help agencies plan transition to the new model, create and facilitate cloud computing governance structure and help with development of security policies.
In his speech at NASA earlier this month, Kundra said government agencies were hemorrhaging money by building new data centers every time they ran out of room in their existing ones. Federal IT budget was about $76 billion, $19 billion of which was being spent in IT infrastructure, he said. Kundra wants to make sure agencies do not continue to build when they can leverage infrastructure that already exists in the private sector.
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Keywords: GSA, government cloud, cloud computing, eGlobalTech, Vivek Kundra, data center consulting | | 
