08 Aug Criterion Systems Awarded $85M to Operate the USDA National Information Technology Center (NITC)
VIENNA, Va., August 8, 2017 – Criterion Systems, Inc. today announced the company was awarded an $85 million Alliant Small Business task order to provide 75 full-time employees to support a full range of Information Technology (IT) services in support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Information Technology Center (NITC) within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO).
On January 1, 2017, Criterion began providing 24x7x365 mission-critical support across the IT life cycle, focused on comprehensive, cloud-based hosting services, associated operations, security, and professional support services. This includes executing the USDA Risk Management Framework (RMF), technical security controls, inter-agency communication, security management, governance and compliance, vulnerability management and response/remediation, and business continuity to a customer base of 35 federal organizations through the management of their enterprise data centers, which host business applications supporting millions of citizens across the country.
NITC is responsible for operation of the USDA Enterprise Data Centers in Kansas City, Mo.; Saint Louis, Mo.; and Beltsville, Md. The NITC-managed Enterprise Data Center is a federally-owned cloud services provider, offering agencies enterprise-class infrastructure built from the ground up with market-leading technologies.
“We are proud to provide expert IT infrastructure technical support to ensure that NITC customers can focus on their core missions across the agency without worrying about the IT infrastructure,” stated Promod Sharma, Criterion’s President and CEO. “This is an exciting opportunity to monitor rapidly advancing IT technologies to create and deploy new product offerings which can be marketed across the entire Federal IT infrastructure marketplace, in competition with commercially-owned IT infrastructure services. We look forward to more growth as Federal computing consolidates into GSA-qualified data centers such as the NITC, as required by FITARA legislation.”
This is Criterion’s third prime contract supporting the USDA. Criterion provides application development support to the U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management (FAM) and the Food and Nutrition Services (FNS).