CenturyLink's hot streak for government contracts continues as it has landed yet another task order, this time with the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). The task order, which was awarded by the General Services Administration's Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program, has a minimum value of $470 million over the life of the 15-year contract.
RELATED: CenturyLink lands $1.6B U.S. Department of Interior contract
Earlier this month, CenturyLink won a $1.6 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Interior (DoI), as well as a U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) contract that's worth up to $75 million. Last year CenturyLink was awarded a contract to provide connectivity for NASA.
CenturyLink will be a provider of a wide area network to the SSA, as well as related high-speed network services. Under SSA's dual carrier network approach, CenturyLink said it won the task order with the biggest scope and is responsible for all single and dual carrier requirements, including architecting and deploying SSA's 100 gigabit data replication network.
CenturyLink will also provide Ethernet, virtual private network, intrusion prevention and self-healing optical wave ring services with speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps at each of SSA's more than 1,700 locations in the U.S. and around the world, including data centers, field offices, foreign service posts, headquarters, program service centers, regional offices, remote operations centers and external business partner sites.
The award also includes secure high-speed cloud connectivity, proactive distributed denial of service protections and a network operations center (NOC) that supports all SSA activities and its more than 60,000 employees 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year.
On the cloud front, CenturyLink has on ramp partnerships in place with the top cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Azure Government, Google and Oracle through its Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections.
"Social Security's network, called SSANet, is the central nervous system of all SSA operations, which touch every American from birth throughout their entire life," said CenturyLink's David Young, CenturyLink senior vice president, public sector, in a statement. "SSA continues to place its trust in CenturyLink as a mission-critical network provider by extending and expanding its relationship with us as we help the agency modernize its IT systems that provide crucial services to the American public."
In addition to the core network services, CenturyLink will provide dedicated program and operations management staff, as well as lifecycle engineering services, in support of SSA's goal to improve its enterprise network.
CenturyLink has been a contributor to SSA's move to next-generation networking services since the company was named the agency's primary managed networking services provider in 2012 via GSA's Networx program.
SSA pays retirement, disability and survivor benefits to more than 64 million people. Social Security was founded in 1934 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
CenturyLink was the first supplier last year to garner the authority to operate under the GSA's 15-year, $50 billion EIS program. EIS was designed to award various contracts to vendors that help federal agencies to buy and update their IT and telecommunications infrastructure services. It's an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) program that serves as the follow-on to GSA's Networks, WITS3 and regional telecommunications services contracts.