The Labor Department released a May 26 request for information soliciting industry feedback over a planned migration by the department of its 21,469 email users into a cloud system. Email is one of three services the department has told the Office of Management and Budget it will migrate to the cloud. The other two are website hosting and email archiving.

The RFI characterizes Labor's current email infrastructure as consisting of eight instances of MS Exchange 2003 and one instance of MS Exchange 2007. Currently, each of Labor's nine major agencies is responsible for the operation and maintenance of its underlying IT infrastructure to deliver email. In addition, Labor's implementation of  Enterprisewide Directory Services consists of multiple forests, the RFI says.

Labor does not appear to be opting for a fully online system, however, since the RFI specifies access via a desktop client and calls for compatibility with Microsoft Outlook.

Any cloud system will also have to meet moderate-level authority to operate under the Federal Information Security Management Act, the RFI adds. In addition, it calls for identity management services through Security Assertion Markup Language.

Agencies are under a "cloud first" Office of Management and Budget push to have one cloud solution in place by December 2011 and up to three cloud-based services by June 2012. Email so far has proven the most common agency response to the policy, with it constituting about 14 percent of the 78 services recently identified by 25 large federal agencies as suitable for cloud migration.

For more:
- go to the RFI on FBO.gov

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