Defense Enterprise Office Solution to improve performance, affordability of DOD enterprise services

The Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) acquisition of a commercial software as a service solution for unified capabilities is intended to aid the Department of Defense (DOD) in replacing disparate legacy enterprise information technology services for office productivity, messaging, content management, and collaboration.

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) unified capabilities portfolio manager, Brian Hermann, described the program’s intent and acquisition plan during the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium in Baltimore May 16.

“We’ve had feedback from the DOD management, financial, and technical leaders. They’ve looked at the services used by (DOD agencies) and said, ‘You need to change the way you use these services. It’s no longer necessary for every application to be on your desktop. Perhaps you can have web-based access to some of these capabilities and both improve the security and reduce the cost of these capabilities,’” Hermann said.

Using DEOS - a $7.8 billion single award, five-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract vehicle with a five year base period and one five-year option - Hermann said the DOD can replace systems such as Defense Enterprise Email, the DOD Enterprise Portal Service, Defense Collaboration Services, and many other similar organizationally-provided capabilities.

DEOS will better align resources, processes, and services; enable interoperability between the services and agencies; and leverage the buying power of the DOD for efficiencies of scale.

Hermann emphasized DEOS is not meant for developing new capabilities.

“Our goal is to take the capabilities that are available now, change the way we work to take advantage of these commercial services, and receive all of the upgrades and improvements that industry brings to their commercial customers,” he said.

He said DISA’s objective is to offer tiered pricing to ensure DOD agencies pay only for services they use.

“It (tiered pricing) lowers the barrier for adoption to the department in a big way. It’s important to us. It provides some flexibility as well,” Hermann said. “Organizations begin to change the way they operate based on how they use the service.”

Over time, DISA expects DEOS to move toward a true enterprise-level service that provides geographic redundancy and local survivability.

Although DEOS will first be deployed on the Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), Hermann said one of DOD’s unified capability priorities is to build out DEOS in the classified environment, as well as in non-continental United States locations with denied, disconnected, intermittent, and limited bandwidth.

“We have folks all around the world who need access to these services,” he said.

A draft request for proposal (RFP) was open for comments through May 7, and the RFP is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018. Hermann said the contract will be awarded in the second quarter of fiscal year 2019.

He reminded potential vendors their offerings must have a provisional authorization at DOD Cloud Impact Level-5, as defined in the DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide.

“We think we’ve engaged well with industry and with the military departments and agencies to make sure DEOS is going to meet DOD’s needs out of the gate and in the future,” Hermann said.

*Posted Friday, May 21, 2018