CMS awards $15B data management contract

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services last week awarded a $15 billion contract to consolidate data centers and manage its immense stores of data. Eight vendors were awarded spots on the 10-year contract, called the Virtual Data Center contract. They will provide applications hosting, telecommunications and networking, disaster recovery, enterprise security, and other services. The contract will help consolidate the agency's data centers to between 6 and 8, reduce energy consumption and eliminate duplicative spending on hardware and software, said the agency's CIO, Tony Trenkle. CMS manages a network of 80-plus data centers and stores and maintains 370 terabytes of Medicare data and 30 terabytes of Medicaid data.