Department appoints AWS specialist to help prepare for upcoming migration to a new provider, but stresses engagement is not focused on a particular vendor and does not portend any preference
HM Revenue and Customs has signed a multimillion-pound deal with a cloud consultancy to help shape a £500m-plus long-term project to close down ageing datacentres and move to a hyperscale cloud environment.
The department has appointed an expert in Amazon Web Services offerings, Cloudscaler, to provide “technical advisory support for [its] datacentre exit programme” – but insists that the engagement will not focus on one vendor’s technology, and does not indicate an advantage for AWS in bidding for the half-a-billion-pound deal.
Earlier this year, the tax agency revealed that – as part of work migrate data and systems out of three datacentres operated by Fujitsu – HMRC intended to sign a 10-year £500m contract with a provider of “hyperscaler services”.
The hyperscale market is comprised of the world’s biggest public cloud hosting firms and is dominated by Microsoft and AWS which, between them, hold as much as 80% market share in the UK, according to a recent regulatory report. Other firms often grouped in the hyperscale bracket include Google, IBM, and Oracle.
The deadline for any of these suppliers to register to bid for the HMRC deal passed last month, and the procurement process is ongoing. The aim is to sign an agreement with the chosen bidder next summer.
In the meantime, on 1 July Cloudscaler was appointed to an initial three-month engagement covering “the provision of client-side advisory services [for the] Data Centre Exit programme, delivered using distinct statements of works”. The deal, which can be extended by six further months, is initially valued at £2.6m.
The London-based IT firm’s website describes it as a company that “designs, builds and operates enterprise AWS platforms”. PublicTechnology contacted HMRC asking if the consultancy contract indicated a preference for AWS to be appointed as its hyperscale partner of choice – and, if not, what steps were being taken to mitigate against any potential advantage.
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In response, an HMRC spokesperson said: “We’ve appointed Cloudscaler to provide expert technical support to help us prepare for the migration. They are not involved in the selection process, which will be conducted strictly in line with procurement law to ensure fairness, transparency, and equal opportunity for all bidders.”
It is understood that the precise scope of the work to be conducted by the supplier is intended to be “agnostic” to specific platforms or vendors. The wider procurement procedure for the £500m hyperscaler also has dedicated protocols for potential conflicts of interest and, where necessary, ethical wall agreements are put in place.
In procurement documents published earlier this year, HMRC said that: “The authority acknowledges that hyperscalers may wish to sub-contract elements of the service delivery, but it is mandatory that the contracting entity is a capable hyperscaler who will manage the migration and hosting from the current on-premises solution.”
The chosen provider will first be asked to deliver work to “migrate all of the in-scope services and associated infrastructure from the existing on-premises datacentres to the cloud”. After this migration work has been completed, “the selected supplier will provide cloud hosting capabilities for in-scope services in a secure cloud environment to ensure continuity of services”, according to a planning notice.
“The supplier will be required to provide a platform capable of sustaining business change, as well as mitigating current security and resilience concerns,” the document added.
