Cloud Hosting

The Home Office is seeking a partner to move one of its systems toAmazon Web Services (AWS), claiming its current cloud hosting provider has "reached its potential".

In anadvert posted on the Government's Digital Marketplace, the Home Office said it is seeking three suppliers to bid for a six-month contract to move its Digital Capabilities to the public cloud.

The tender states: "The HO (Home Office) Digital Capabilities programme deals with a significant amount of data and our current hosting provider has reached its potential.

"Home Office has determined that the in-house Amazon Web Service platform is the most appropriate location to run these services.

"Problems to be solved are the migration of all the digital services to the new platform within the time frame and with minimal disruption to the live service."

The Home Office is specifically looking for a supplier to provide solutions architects and developers to build the new AWS environment and provide a seamless switch to the new platform.

The closing date for applications is 17 August, with the start date pencilled in for no later than 9 October. The contract can be extended for a further three months if required.

Chris Bunch, head of Europe at AWS partner Cloudreach, claimed that all of the major central government departments are exploring public cloud in one way or another, now that the big providers' UK datacentres are up and running.

"The Home Office ultimately will be big, big spenders on AWS and Azure at least and maybe Google in the future after it announced its UK datacentres as well," he said. "Some of the more headline organisations are using it now.

"If you look at this advert it's for one particular platform. This is the snowball gathering with more and more of these workloads moving to the public cloud and this one isn't just moving, it's a complete re-architecture. What would be interesting to see is a central government department really going all in."

Bunch added that government organisations are increasingly looking to keep the management of these systems in-house, rather than pay out for an expensive IT outsourcing firm.

"It's symptomatic of a trend that they want to build and develop skills in their organisation rather than just outsource it to companies, and it's a trend we very much believe in," he said.

"We call our professional services team the Cloud Enablement Team because we very much want people to learn rather than just outsource a problem. That doesn't really help anyone apart from the old traditional outsourcing companies and their margins.

"We've certainly spoken to some of the central government organisations about how we might help them skill their own managed services team. It's the case with some of our customer that they want Cloudreach to manage it, but in some cases they want to do it themselves because maybe they already have some operational people and they want to give them the opportunity to learn."

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