The cloud services giant recently put in place the second iteration of its One Government Value Agreement – the initial version of which offered public sector customers baseline savings of 18%

The Department for Business and Trade signed a multimillion-pound three-year contract to become the latest government agency to take advantage of the new public sector-wide discount deal from Amazon Web Services.

OGVA 2.0 – the second iteration of the One Government Value Agreement – came into effect at the start of December. By effectively treating the public sector as a single customer, the arrangement between AWS and the Crown Commercial Service requires organisations to sign up to a three-year contract with the cloud vendor and, in return, offers discounts on hosting and other services.

The terms of the new deal have not been publicised, but the previous iteration offered a baseline discount of 18%.

The DBT’s deal under the terms of OGVA 2.0 came into effect on 1 January, and runs until the end of 2026. The department expects to spend £13.3m via the contract during this time – although this figure may increase or decrease, depending on usage levels.

As well as a core “a cloud platform for hosted websites, applications, databases, and security systems”, the deal offers DBT access to a wide range of AWS services, covering supporting software and managed services.

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The section of the contract dedicated to data-protection terms for the two parties makes it clear that AWS believes its customers’ security needs and compliance requirements are best served by the cloud vendor’s own tools.

“Under the AWS shared responsibility model, the buyer also has a responsibility to ensure the protection of its own buyer data,” the contract says. “Supplier provides tools and service offerings to assist buyers with the protection of buyer data [and] strongly recommends that buyers use AWS services such as CloudTrail, Security Hub and GuardDuty to ensure that the buyer is in compliance with data protection legislation.”

The DBT has joined a growing list of departments to take advantage of OGVA 2.0. On the day the new arrangement came in effect – 1 December – the Home Office, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions signed new AWS agreements. Between them, the deals could are expected to be worth between £680m and £900m to the tech firm.

This represents a potential more-than-threefold increase on the £270m value of the three departments’ previous AWS contracts, signed under the first iteration of the OGVA arrangement.