It’s healthcare enrollment season again and the embattled healthcare.gov website has prepared for the busy season by ordering up an additional 100TB of cloud storage space for infrastructures back end. The FedBizOpps website, which posts information about contracts and jobs available in the US government, posted a listing on December 1st highlighting the need for the additional storage.
All reports indicate that Verizon Terremark will get the $1.8 million dollar contract in efforts to modify the existing cloud storage package that the website already consumes. Analysts expect that a rising demand in health care services being brokered by the Healthcare.gov website this coming season. Many analysts inside the government felt as if the storage capacity of the Healthcare.gov website wouldn’t be sufficient for the rising number of healthcare applicants. The $1.8 million dollar boost to the Healthcare.gov website also includes licensing and other mechanisms to ensure the functionality of the additional space.
Documents found on the FedBizOpps website mention that “Performance testing and analysis of the additional required support of the on-boarding users revealed that current storage is not sufficient to sustain operations through open enrollment.” The website also goes on to say that there may be insufficient time available for a bidding process to occur and many government analysts suggest that it would be impractical to host different cloud services inside of a Terremark data center. The documents also mention that “CMS could not have predicted this storage shortfall. This program is in its infancy and CMS has no historical evidence upon which to base systems performance parameters.”
Healthcare.gov allows Americans to purchase health care plans that can become effective on January 1st 2015 if users sign up successfully before December 15th. Healthcare.gov was embattled last year because of its much publicized shaky start. Most of the kinks seem to be worked out of the system as most users are not reporting any problems when signing up for new health care plans though the website.