Government’s largest department signs French IT giant to take on delivery of identity access and authorisation services, as well as support offerings for core underpinning infrastructure and oversight of delivery

The Ministry of Justice has signed a major multimillion-pound contract for services to support and manage end-user access to devices.

Newly published commercial information reveals that, on 22 May, the ministry entered into an initial four-year agreement with IT services giant Atos for the provision of “end-user computing platforms and legacy services”. The deal, which can be extended by a further 12 months, is expected to be worth about £70m to the supplier, inclusive of VAT. This includes spending of around £12m during the contract’s first year.

The text of the contract adds that Atos will provide the MoJ with four key strands of services, encompassing: “transition from incumbent services; identity and access management (including legacy active directories); technical infrastructure; and management of legacy applications”.

The access-management services concern the “authorisation of end users to access services”.

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The technical infrastructure offerings delivered by the firm, meanwhile, will include “support of live and non-live environments; centralised platform services; distributed platform services; storage backup and recovery; datacentre services; break/fix services, server based print services; and facsimile services”, the contract adds.

Service-management delivery encompasses the oversight of “functions that support the delivery and monitoring of services [including] information security management that will support confidentiality, availability and integrity of the services, [and] support to legacy applications infrastructure, including digital audio recording infrastructure management”.

The deal does not include the supply of end-user devices or core productivity platforms themselves. The text of the contract adds that the ministry “has the strategic objective of delivering a single technology ecosystem to all users” – overseen by the MoJ directly – “whilst ensuring the continuation of critical end user computing services used by” staff.

Delivery of end user services has previously been split between an internally delivered service for about 60,000 staff, and an overarching deal with a supplier covering another 48,000. The ministry “is in the process of disaggregating” this contract and replacing it with “services to be delivered via a combination of external and inhouse providers” – of which the Atos deal forms a key part.