Notice ID: 36C10B22Q0189
The users of this program are primarily VA Information Security Officers and VA Information Technology (IT) personnel with responsibility for media sanitization, but can include any VA employee with media requiring sanitization. Since its inception, the number of sanitization program users has grown. For example, the number of users serviced by the Media Sanitization program has grown from around 30 in 2005 to over 800 at the end of 2013, and the number of users is expected to continue to grow on this contract to possibly 1000 or more.
The Media Sanitization program is a nationwide program that services all of VA. Consequently, the environment and the type of sensitive data vary among the administrations, program offices and VACO. The Media Sanitization Program services all types of VA environments and all types of data. In the past year, VA sanitized 227,873 pieces destroyed media for FY21. VA follows NIST Special Publication 800-88 Rev. 1 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” December 2014, and VA Handbook 6500 “VA Cybersecurity Program” 2019. The media types that the VA National Media Sanitization program currently accepts include hard drives, tape media, floppy disks, optical disks, data and audio cassettes, microfiche, printer ribbon, x-rays, removable USB/memory, and hand-held devices, such as cellular phones (including smartphones), iPads, Tablets, and digital cameras.
The Contractor shall track, receive, conduct the inventory and provide reports on the certified sanitization and disposal of up to 400,000 pieces annually of VA sensitive media including hard drives; compact discs (CDs) and digital video discs (DVDs); digital platters; iPads; smartphones and cell phones; individual VHS backup and other tape media; flash drives (i.e. thumb drives) and other media types. The Contractor shall also provide any equipment and shipping materials required for sanitization of VA sensitive media to include secure plastic shipping containers; strapping material and sequential locks (see section A5.1 for specifications); barcoded shipping and storage bags and other supplies (including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in sequential order) for labeling thumb drives, smartphones and other devices without visible serial numbers.
