The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) plans to overhaul its digital infrastructure, after facing limitations with its on-premise equipment.

In a procurement notice for 'Project Golden Gate,' the AFLCMC said that "some teams have even been confronted with temporary work stoppages due to limitations on compute, network, and storage resources."

The notice added: "In addition to current limitations, procurement of additional hardware to bolster on-prem capabilities has been plagued with long lead times that extend beyond 200 days, and the workload associated with procurement has occupied an impractical amount of time for key AFLCMC employees."

Golden Gate plans to find a company to "help deliver and transition to hyper-elastic compute and storage capability at [Impact Level 6, secret classification], which includes unique Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence handling caveats."

AFLCMC "prefers a core cloud provider to offer software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which can support multiple different programming languages, tools, and frameworks."

The cloud service should have a reliability and availability of 99 percent and is expected to be delivered 12 months after the contract is awarded.

Along with the cloud service, AFLCMC seeks a 'Network in a Box (NiaB)' Deployment to deploy a network configuration and connection to new locations within 60 days of ordering.

Currently, there are more than 30 open requests from organizations to get a connection to a network which allows for collaborative communication and development between key stakeholders at an IL 6+ (S//SAR) level.

But most organizations do not have the experience or expertise to handle such connections, "leading to prohibitively long timelines between a request for network connection and date when the connection is active."

The project has a four-month timeline.

In addition to this, Project Golden Gate is also in search of an Edge Data Transport service.

The procurement notice explained: "In the past, AFLCMC members have had to physically courier data boxes from the test location to a separate location for ingestion and analysis. This required an incredibly heavy lift in terms of financial burden, personnel needed, and limited AFLCMC’s ability to analyze and respond to data points collected in the test in a relevant timeline."

The offeror will need to provide an Edge node with two-way network connection at a test location that could be within or without the Continental US. An ideal solution would be able to transport up to one petabyte of data to anywhere in the continental United States within 8 (objective) to 24 (threshold) hours via a hybrid cloud or cloud connection.

The project has a four-month delivery date.

Finally, the AFLCMC is searching for a One-Way Data Transfer as a Service (DTaaS). It said: "This solution will have to interface with on-prem, hybrid, and cloud networks at various classification levels, including SAP." This also has a four-month delivery date.

Original offers are due by 27 February.