Defra announces £150m contracts for hosting and storage
The UK Government’s beleaguered environment department needs to overhaul IT support to improve efficiency and secure long-term cost savings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [Defra] has notified existing suppliers of major changes coming to its technology infrastructure. In a Request for Information [RFI] notice to market, the organisation announced its intention to ‘procure Future Hosting & Storage Services’ to support existing systems.
High availability, scalability and security of all data and applications have been listed as priorities, with a number of services set to be covered by the new agreement. These will ‘include but are not limited to: infrastructure services; platform services; datacenter facilities management and site services; and distributed… comms rooms server management.’
Overall, the estimated value of new hosting and storage agreements is estimated to be £128.1million, or just under £154million including VAT. Defra hopes to ‘partner with suppliers who can provide innovative and cost-effective solutions to meet diverse and evolving needs.’
Although not looking to directly increase competition for contracts, the department wants to meet with potential suppliers to brief them on requirements before the tender. This would cover current and near-future hosting and storage needs, alongside strategic direction further into the future.
‘The purpose of the RFI is to provide suppliers with information about the upcoming procurement opportunity, to enable them to provide input into the procurement process and service design,’ the notice read. Specifically, Defra wants feedback on the scope and requirement of its plans, details of commercial approaches and models, and the completion of a market engagement questionnaire to support the tender phase.
‘These documents are designed to gather valuable input from interested suppliers to inform our procurement strategy and requirements,’ it continued. ‘This procurement is solely focused on hosting and storage-related services – application transformation and migration are delivered via a number of additional ongoing programmes. The FHAS supplier will support the hosting related element of any such activity and may input into the application review/treatment process, however the application related services are contracted separately to this procurement.’
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