UK Government Spends Another £1B On Cloud Migration And Services

The UK government has awarded a contract worth up to £1 billion ($1.3 billion) to get tech services companies to help various bodies and departments make the leap to the cloud.

The Crown Commercial Service, a unit of the Cabinet Office, has awarded another chunk of the G-Cloud 14 framework, under which a maximum value of £1 billion could be spent. It is the last award to be made under the new framework for cloud computing and associated services.

The latest award is for Lot 4 of the competition, with 42 suppliers winning places on the framework. It is designed to help UK public sector and third sector organizations transition to cloud software or hosting services. This might include the provision of planning services "to enable customers to move to cloud software and/or hosting services," an official posting said.

Setup and migration are also part of the offering and might involve the process of consolidating and transferring a collection of workloads. Workloads can include emails, files, calendars, document types, related metadata, instant messages, applications, user permissions, compound structure, and linked components. Security services, quality assurance and performance testing, and training also make up part of the offering.

Forty-two companies, including Aire Logic and Version One Solutions, are among the winning bidders. Some familiar companies winning places on the framework are Capgemini, CGI, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte.

The Lot 4 award follows the award of Lots 1 to 3, made in a single announcement last month, with the total expected maximum value of £6.5 billion ($8.2 billion). The competition for these services was launched in February.

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G-Cloud 14 is set to replace 13. In April, a government spokesperson told The Register its cloud framework agreements offered the widest range of suppliers for the cloud market, including 5,000 suppliers on G-Cloud 13, with 91 percent of them SMEs.

"Government's Cloud First policy is kept under regular review to ensure it reflects the latest guidance and recommendations and states that organizations should always scrutinize their selection of vendors," they said.

However, The Register also uncovered a document from the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO), which said: "UK government's current approach to cloud adoption and management across its departments faces several challenges," which combined "risk concentration and vendor lock-in that inhibit UK government's negotiating power over the cloud vendors."

Following the July election of a new government, the CDDO is set to move from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. ®