Cybercrime unit seeks partner to provide DevOps support

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The cybercrime division of the National Crime Agency is seeking a partner to provide software-development support as it moves an array of services to the cloud.

The NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) is planning to move a range of services that currently run on commercial-off-the-shelf software into an Amazon Web Services cloud environment. To assist the migration, the NCCU is seeking to appoint a supplier to an initial contract worth as much as £800,000 and lasting from mid-November until March 2020. An extension of up to 12 months may be awarded in due course.

The winning bidder will be tasked with helping “migrate COTs products to… NCCU AWS cloud infrastructure ensuring existing guard rails are followed and best practice is adhered to”. The chosen firm will also be expected to “provide rapid application-development services to implement [and] create a number of lightweight serverless applications [and] experiments”.

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The cloud-based services will ultimately be used by NCCU staff and other law-enforcement professionals. The supplier will need to “work with [the] wider organisation, ensuring compliance, with an ambition to connect corporate network and support other initiatives requiring DevOps skills”.

“This work is designed to support the provision a resilient suite of tools to law enforcement partners,” the agency added. “The NCCU have implemented the landing zone pattern and the services need to exist within this approach.”

The National Crime Agency has already undertaken 18 months of work “which has resulted in a mature platform using best-of-breed technologies”.

“The approach is well-defined and understood,” it said. “The work has resulted in a number of systems being migrated into AWS.”

Bids for the DevOps support contract are open until 2 October. The winning bidder will join a team comprised of NCCU staff and external contractors, split on a roughly 40/60 basis. Work will take place at NCA headquarters in London’s Vauxhall district.