Description
The United States Department of the Interior, on behalf of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is seeking a managed optical network provider to deliver a turnkey, end-to-end backbone service. The scope of work includes fiber plant provisioning, equipment lifecycle management, 24x7 operations and incident response, capacity management, security and compliance, cloud interconnect operations, documentation, training, and testing. The contractor must provide services from U.S.-based facilities, with no offshore service delivery or support allowed without prior written authorization. The contractor must also ensure that all personnel and subcontractors are U.S.-based. The contract will be a firm-fixed-price task order with a 12-month base period and three 12-month option periods.
• The contractor will operate and enhance the NCI Fiber Network Backbone to deliver continuous, secure, and future-ready connectivity for NCI research and mission operations.
• The contractor will provide 24x7 operations and incident response, with a priority 1 response time of 15 minutes and post-incident RFO within 2 business days.
• The contractor will maintain 10/40/100 Gbps ring links and engineer new diverse links, with a roadmap to 400 Gbps support.
• The contractor will implement end-to-end encryption on all backbone connections and maintain RMF artifacts and continuous monitoring consistent with NIH policies and NIST baselines.
• The contractor will operate and optimize AWS Direct Connect and GCP Interconnect links, with all interconnect management and monitoring activities performed from U.S.-based facilities.