US Election Commission Invests $9.8M in IT Infrastructure

The US Federal Election Commission (FEC), through the US General Services Administration (GSA), has awarded a five-year contract that will provide colocation, managed hosting, security and network services, as well as professional services to the FEC in two Savvis data centers. Savvis will also host the FEC.gov website and disaster recovery solutions. David Shacochis, Vice President, Global Public Sector at Savvis, told FutureGov: “For large, complex environments that need a wealth of IT infrastructure in the public sector, security and reliability are paramount. Governments have a unique set of business problems, and they’re looking to become more responsive, and provide greater value to the taxpayer, by becoming more adaptive and flexible.”
The GSA, through its online eBuy portal, has awarded various contracts to Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendors in the past five years, in compliance with The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002.
FISMA recognises the importance of information security to protect the economic and national security interests of US governmental agencies, in which each agency is required “to develop, document, and implement an agency-wide program to provide information security for the information and information systems that support the operations and assets of the agency, including those provided or managed by another agency, contractor, or other source,” according to the FISMA website.
The FEC, an independent regulatory agency, is tasked with the disclosure of campaign finance information, the enforcement of the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and oversight of the public funding of presidential elections. It was created in 1975 by the US Congress in order to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), the statute that governs the financing of federal elections.

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