US DoD will consider migrating biometric databases to cloud providers other than AWS

The U.S. Department of Defence has amended its solicitation for a migration of its biometric databases to the cloud, clarifying that the cloud environment the database ends up in does not necessarily have to be Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud.

The original request for information from the DoD specifically stated the project was to move the database to AWS, but the updated document states that the department is cloud vendor-neutral. AWS is the DoD’s current cloud provider, through a contract with a system integrator.

As NextGov point out, the update comes in response to a question posted to the solicitation page.

“The system integrator’s proposal will determine the cloud service provider,” a DoD representative answered. “The government’s interest is in the best value proposition to meet the government’s requirements.”

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) lists five cloud service providers that offer infrastructure meeting IL5 (Impact Level 5) standards, including IBM, Microsoft, MilCloud and Oracle.

The responses also reveal that the first request for proposals following the RFI will be issued in the third quarter of 2021 at the earliest, and are coy to the suggestion that Idemia’s MBSS could be replaced as the system’s core search engine multimodal algorithms. DoD reiterates multiple times that the system integrator is responsible for choosing biometric algorithms that satisfy project requirements.

The due date for responses was also extended to December 4, 2020.

Article Topics

Amazon  |  biometric database  |  biometrics  |  cloud services  |  Department of Defense  |  government purchasing  |  military  |  RFI