Contracts cover provision of ‘hyperscale’ environment and related professional services

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HM Revenue and Customs has signed a £40m-plus deal for cloud computing capacity from Amazon Web Services.

Newly published procurement documents reveal that the tax agency entered into a two-year contract with the tech firm on 1 September. The contract is worth £41m.

Beyond this, details are scarce, but the award notice indicates that AWS has been signed up to deliver “’hyperscale’ compute cloud service provision”.

Hyperscale computing refers to IT infrastructure that can seamlessly expand – or contract – based on demand or usage. Offering such services necessitates vast datacentre capacity, and so the market for doing so is dominated by vendor giants such as Oracle, Microsoft, Google and, most of all, AWS.

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Alongside the contract to provide HMRC with this flexible computing environment, the cloud provider also signed a separate £2m deal to deliver to the department support with “the migration of systems [and] applications to AWS-hosted services”. This deal, which took effect exactly a month before the hyperscale computing contract, was signed with the tech firm’s AWS Professional Services arm. It also runs for two years.

The contract says: “AWS Professional Services consultants help to accelerate the adoption of AWS solutions by accessing and providing AWS’s deep experience, proven frameworks, methodologies, and architectural designs.”

The signature of HMRC’s deals with AWS were signed just weeks before it was announced in November that, as part of the One Government Cloud Strategy programme, the cloud firm had signed a memorandum of understanding through which it will offer organisations throughout the public sector preferential terms by treating them, essentially, as a single customer.

Since that agreement came into effect, another major Whitehall user of AWS storage and services, the Home Office, has replaced its existing £100m-plus engagement with a new deal under the improved terms.

AWS became the sixth cloud provider to sign a government MoU, joining Google, HPE, IBM, Microsoft and UKCloud.

HMRC is currently in the midst of the five-year Securing Our Technical Future programme which will see the department move services and data out of three Fujitsu-run datacentres and embrace cloud environments. Its contract with the Japanese firm runs until June 2022 – which has been set as the deadline for moving 600 services either into a public cloud environment, or otherwise to infrastructure owned by Crown Hosting Data Centres.