Stan Kaczmarczyk

Officials from the General Services Administration (GSA) said this week that the agency is preparing the next version of the federal government’s main cloud computing acquisition vehicle – the Infrastructure-as-a-Service Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) – as part of a broader effort to better position federal agencies to take advantage of the growing number of commercial cloud services.

Awarded to 12 cloud services vendors in October 2010, the $76 million Infrastructure-as-a-Service BPA was designed to provide agencies with a one-stop shop for ready-made cloud computing services, particularly Web hosting, storage and virtual machines. So far, the contract vehicle has attracted the likes of the Department of Homeland Security, which recently moved its public Web hosting to the cloud, and the Department of Labor, which now leverages cloud services for enterprise case and document management. Keep reading →