Central agency signs agreement for tech giant’s hosting and support services, with the supplier required to provide government with detailed intel on its public sector engagements and group financial performance
The Cabinet Office has signed a three-year £20m agreement with Amazon Web Services, covering the provision of cloud infrastructure to support departmental transformation.
On 1 September, Whitehall’s central department entered into a 36-month agreement with the tech giant, a newly published commercial notice reveals. The deal will be worth about £20.4m to AWS, inclusive of VAT, the document indicates.
For this price, the Cabinet Office will be provided with “cloud-based infrastructure that supports applications, enables future digital transformation and scalability of services”.
The text of the contract itself reveals that the engagement includes not just core cloud hosting, but also AWS support services and the vendor’s ‘bring your own licence’ offering, which enables customers to manage their software subscriptions.
The document outlines that AWS cannot apply any maximum limits to the Cabinet Office’s cloud usage. The department also has the responsibility “for selecting the appropriate supplier region” of the world in which data will be stored – and AWS “will not alter buyer’s selection”, the contract states.
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In the area of professional services, the two parties “will agree on one or more statements of work, which shall more specifically detail the scope of a particular requirement [and AWS then] will execute against… the detailed requirements within”.
Both the vendor and the department will be expected to assume some responsibility for ensuring the protection of government data. While there is no obligation to do so, the agreement makes plan that Amazon “strongly recommends that buyers use AWS services – such as CloudTrail, Security Hub and Guard Duty – to ensure that the buyer is in compliance with data protection legislation”.
The annexes to the agreement outline that AWS is required to provide the department with comprehensive details of UK public-sector contracts held by the company and its subsidiaries – as well as deals that involve any form of critical national infrastructure.
The cloud vendor is also contractually obliged to “provide sufficient information to allow the appropriate authority to understand the implications on the [company’s] UK public sector business and CNI agreements if the supplier or another member of the supplier group is subject to an insolvency event”.
This information should be supplemented by “sufficient financial information… to understand the current financial interconnectedness of the [AWS] Group and the current performance of the supplier as a standalone entity”.
