DNS Subscription

The General Services Administration (GSA), Office of Governmentwide Policy (OGP) intends to issue a sole source purchase order to Verisign, 21345 Ridgetop Circle, Dulles, Virginia 20166 to acquire a subscription for the use of their proprietary DNS analytic, performance assessment, and reporting tool to enable OGP to more effectively manage the .Gov domain space and ensure compliance with .GOV usage policies for the base period of FY 2012 and additional one-year options for subscription renewal for FY2013 through FY2015. It is expected that the subscription to use this DNS tool will enable the Government to meet its information requirements and generate needed reports regarding DNS traffic and selected data attributes of interest to the Government regarding the use of the .GOV domain space. For example, this service will save the Government thousands of people hours that would be otherwise required to provide on-time information required for OMB reports and analysis in support of the .GOV Task Force. GSA is responsible for managing and overseeing use of the .GOV domain space for the Federal government and serves as the central registrar for all 4,950 .GOV domains and 42,000 websites. As steward of the Federal .Gov top-level domain, GSA requires a subscription service to provide analytic, performance assessment, and report information using Verisign's proprietary DNS traffic analytic and reporting capability, known as the Internet Profiling Service (IPS) tool. This subscription will enable GSA to determine how 4,950 .Gov domains are used on a daily basis and assess whether the content of more than 42,000 related websites complies with Federal policy regarding website usage. More specifically, the IPS tool subscription will enable GSA to: "Crawl" or search through up to 100 pages of content for each web page on a monthly basis (to assess compliance with web content and ensure that web sites do don't contain personally identifiable or other sensitive information); Obtain summary-level, detailed-level and ad hoc reports regarding DNS traffic and related .GOV domain usage and usage trends of interest to the Government; Obtain the secure means to receive and access various DNS analytical and usage reports for .GOV domains; Identify overlapping or redundant web site content by site; Identify any web sites that contain any personally identifiable information (PII) to ensure the proper safeguarding this type of information; Identify Federal domains to assess the agree of adoption of Internet Protocal Version 6 (IPV6); and, Analyze .GOV domain DNS traffic and web site usage for a variety of data characteristics to assess policy compliance and .GOV domain usage. Once this subscription service is acquired to provide the Government with access to Verisign's proprietary analytic and reporting tool, the Government will be able to significantly improve its stewardship and trend analysis capabilities regarding .GOV domain usage, and enhance its monitoring capabilities for .GOV domain traffic and usage to improve policy compliance. In addition, the Government's capabilities to monitor website content will also be measurably enhanced to protect against the inappropriate disclosure of personally identifiable information, redundant or overlapping content, and other potential misuses of .GOV websites to disseminate information to the public or others. Verisign is the only known source that offers a subscription of the kind needed to improve the Government's ability to manage and oversee all DNS traffic and performance as well as usage of the .GOV domain space. Verisign also possesses the only known proprietary analytic, performance assessment, and reporting tool that is capable of meeting the Government's information requirements for the .GOV domain space. Verisign is uniquely positioned at the present time to provide this kind of service because it also currently provides registry support services to the Government under a separate contract and maintains a centralized database that collects various data attributes regarding DNS traffic usage and performance for the .GOV domain space. While this notice of intent is not a request for competitive quotes, interested parties may submit information that shall be considered by GSA. Inquiries may be directed to Kisha Emmanuel, Contracting Officer, via e-mail to kisha.emmanuel@gsa.gov.