Department re-signs contract under terms of new MoU

Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Home Office has renegotiated its £100m-plus cloud-hosting engagement with Amazon Web Services under the terms of the tech giant’s new public sector-wide agreement.

Last month AWS became the latest vendor to sign a memorandum of understanding as part of the One Government Cloud Strategy (OGCS) programme.  

“By treating participating UK government and public sector organisations as a single client, it offers greater cost savings for cloud deployments, similar to those available to large commercial customers,” AWS said at the time. “As part of the agreement, AWS is also establishing a new digital skills fund, which will train over 6,000 civil servants in cloud computing at no cost to government.”

In December 2019, the Home Office used the G-Cloud 11 framework to award to AWS a £100m four-year deal headed “Public Cloud Hosting Services – Service Continuity”.

This deal has now been superseded by one signed under the terms of the cloud firm’s public sector MoU.

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Few details are provided of how the terms differ from the previous G-Cloud contract, but the deal – which runs from 1 December 2020 to 30 November 2023 – suggests that the department has an even-greater need for cloud capacity than it did a year ago.

Despite being, effectively, one year shorter than the contract it replaces, the £120m estimated value of the incoming arrangement is £20m more than the previous deal.

Research undertaken by analyst Tussell last year on behalf of the GMB Union found that the Home Office was Amazon’s biggest public-sector customer.

AWS became the sixth cloud provider to agree a public-sector MoU with the government, joining Google, HPE, IBM, Microsoft and UKCloud – all of whom signed agreements over the summer. Amazon had long been expected to join their ranks, but the arrangement was not finalised until November. 

When it was announced, the cloud heavyweight said that – in addition to its own large-scale deals with government customers – its public-sector engagements also help support SMEs. This would continue to be the case under the terms of the new MoU, dubbed the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA).

“Through the government’s G-Cloud framework, more than 150 companies have already used AWS to help them provide more than £1.3bn of their own services to government,” it said. “More than half of these companies are categorised as SMEs, and the OGVA is instrumental in levelling the playing field even further by enabling these companies to compete effectively for larger public sector contracts that they would not have been considered for in the past.”