Agriculture Department to Introduce Basic Ordering Agreement for Cloud Services

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to introduce Stratus, a cloud basic ordering agreement that would streamline information technology operations so that officials could concentrate on deploying and sustaining business applications.

Stratus will be divided into hyperscale cloud infrastructure, software-as-a-service and integration and development. Each category is expected to have its own contractor pool.

For the SaaS category, USDA issued a request for information asking potential vendors how the contracting process could work. It wants responses by May 4, FedScoop reported Friday.

Stratus is meant to augment solutions offered by the Digital Infrastructure Service Center, potentially leading to lower costs, improved resource allocation and up-to-date IT systems.

DISC provides modernization support to the USDA and others in the federal government. It works with cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

According to Stratus’ presolicitation notice on SAM .gov, DISC has served as an “easy button” for the adoption of cloud infrastructure services.