Credit: Peter Byrne/PA Wire/PA Images

The NHS Test and Trace programme has spent £2m on a Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

Newly published procurement information reveals that the scheme entered into a one-year contract on 1 April.

The deal – awarded to Capita-owned software specialist Trustmarque – has been signed under the terms of Microsoft’s Server and Cloud Enrolment (SCE) initiative, a programme designed to offer the vendor’s “best pricing and benefits” for customers with large deployments of its technology.

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“SCE allows committed customers to standardise broadly on one or more key server and cloud technologies from Microsoft,” said the product fact sheet. “To enrol in an SCE, an installed-base-wide commitment is required to one or more components. This means committing to full software assurance coverage across the installed base of an SCE component.”

On top of offering the “lowest Microsoft Azure pricing” available, potential benefits for SCE customers include unlimited support as well as a “subscription-based option that offers more flexibility when retiring workloads, consolidating, or migrating to the cloud”.

The contract indicates that Trustmarque will be tasked with delivering “additional licences required via [an] Enterprise Subscription Agreement”.

As well as Microsoft products, the deal covers software from third-party Microsoft partner SCEPman, which has developed an automated tool for issuing and authenticating user certificates.

“SCEPman is a fully unattended Certificate Authority using Azure Key Vault for Microsoft Intune-based certificate deployment,” the company’s website said. 

The Test and Trace scheme’s £2m deal is due to expire on 31 March 2022.