GSA Plans Civilian DEOS Cloud Contract for Agencies’ Back-Office Functions

The Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract has been receiving the lion’s share of attention in recent months, but the DOD has also been pursuing another contract in parallel to JEDI, known as DEOS, or Defense Enterprise Office Solution.

The DEOS contract, which is expected to be awarded this summer, is designed to modernize several legacy DOD IT systems by moving them into the commercial cloud, including its enterprise email, portal and collaboration systems. The goal is to shift the department to “common communication, collaboration, and productivity capabilities that are mission-effective, efficient, more widely accessible, and facilitate DoD operations worldwide,” according to a contract solicitation document released in January. 

Now, the General Services Administration is looking to implement a similar vehicle for the civilian side of the federal government. 

GSA Seeks Cloud Efficiencies via New Contract

Alan Thomas, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said last month that the coming Civilian Enterprise Office Solution (CEOS) is still in the “early stages” of development, according to FCW. CEOS will look to gain similar efficiencies via the cloud as DEOS, and the focus will be on standardizing enterprise functions, Thomas said, according to Federal News Network. 

“The federal CIO’s offices said, ‘Hey, we ought to do something similar for civilian,’” Thomas said regarding DEOS and CEOS in a keynote at the BMC Exchange event in Washington, D.C., on May 7. 

“CEOS won't be a carbon copy of DEOS,” Thomas told FCW in an interview after his presentation. “You’re not going to get every agency in the federal government on one email system, but we could do some standardization and create some efficiencies there.”

DEOS is designed to support the Pentagon’s vision to shift to an “integrated/interoperable communication, collaboration, and productivity service, by facilitating trusted information sharing between” combatant commands, services and agencies, and via the consolidation of multiple DOD enterprise services into a single environment. 

DEOS will unify and modernize legacy Defense Information Systems Agency IT enterprise services such as DOD Enterprise Email, DOD Enterprise Portal Service, Defense Collaboration Services, and other DOD-wide legacy capabilities. 

"We’re early. I haven’t mapped it out yet,” Thomas said of the CEOS timetable. “Obviously, it won’t be on the same timeline as DEOS.”

FCW separately reports that when DEOS is awarded this summer, it will include “an initial task order, with integration and initial testing taking place in the fall, and migration planned from fiscal 2020 through 2022,” according to Kevin Tate, a management analyst for the Defense Department CIO’s portfolio lead on enterprise capabilities and productivity services.