Procurement agency awards contract to support timely migration from GOV.UK Platform as a Service – which is slated to close this year – and enable move to an Amazon Web Services environment

The Crown Commercial Service has signed a near-£1m deal to support its migration from government’s soon-to-close public-sector hosting offering and enable the procurement agency to move its digital services into a public cloud environment.

Newly released commercial information reveals that, on 5 June, the Cabinet Office-based buying unit entered into an initial six-month contract with digital transformation consultancy BetterGov. The deal, which can be extended by a further four months, covers the provision of services to support CCS’s exit from the GOV.UK Platform as a Service (GPaas) hosting environment.

GPaaS was created by the Government Digital Service in 2015 and, during its lifetime, has been used by more than 60 public bodies – including government agencies and local authorities – to host 172 individual digital services. GDS announced last year that it was decommissioning the platform, which is currently scheduled to be shut down entirely by the end of this year.

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In a blog post announcing the closure, the digital unit attributed the decision to the fact that “the big cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and others – have upped their game and reduced the barriers to entry for digital teams” looking to host services.

CCS is moving its services to one such provider, according to the text of its contract with BetterGov.

Over the coming months, the London-based firm will “support Crown Commercial Service’s Digital and Data Services Directorate by conducting beta phase build and testing of all tools and processes required to support the migration of CCS Services from GPaaS to Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, and to completion the migration of said services prior to the withdrawal from service of GPaaS early autumn 2023” the document added.

If it runs to its full potential 10-month term, the deal will be worth £750,000 – plus VAT of £150,000.