The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a couple years left on a contract to manage its private cloud infrastructure and wants to know what it would take to move to a public cloud offering.

The agency issued a request for information on July 26 asking about the "process, technical requirements and costs" associated with moving its email and documents systems to the cloud.

FedBizOps: CFPB Email-as-a-Service

Currently, CFPB employees use Microsoft Exchange 2010 for email and SharePoint 2013 to share files, such as Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The contract for these licenses expires in January 2019 and the vendor doesn't have a spot on an approved cloud contract vehicle, according to the RFI.

The cloud solution should be able to handle email and document sharing for around 2,000 users, with an average mailbox size of five gigabytes.

"CFPB users would expect to immediately access emails that are several years old and office automation tools," the RFI states, adding, "CFPB's records management team expects management tools of electronic records" in order to comply with preservation laws.

The questions also go into cybersecurity measures, such as whether the solution has an authorization from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) or can be integrated with Homeland Security's Einstein E3A, a sophisticated firewall that blocks malicious traffic at the Internet Service Provider level.

The RFI includes 27 questions in all, organized into three themes: cost, capability and timeline/effort.

CFPB contracting officials are looking for responses by end-of-business on Aug. 9.

Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.

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