Defra seeking hosting and storage services

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is on the hunt for hosting and storage solutions.

In the market engagement notice, Defra said it wants services to include the provisioning and management of both datacentre-based on-premise and private cloud infrastructure. The project, worth £128 million, will span infrastructure and platform services, datacentre and server room management and cloud engineering, among other services.

The Prior Information Notice (PIN) aims to inform potential suppliers about the procurement opportunity and invite them to participate in the Request for Information (RFI) as part of phase two of the Market Engagement.

Defra said its primary objectives are “to ensure high availability, scalability, and security of our data and applications.”

The organisation is inviting suppliers to attend a virtual presentation on Friday September 6, where it will provide more details.

Defra overhauling IT systems

In April 2023, Defra contracted IT services provider Kyndryl to help manage and support the core network infrastructure used to host and run its critical services.

A month later, the Public Accounts Committee called for a complete overhaul of Defra’s IT systems, which it labelled as “outdated, inefficient, expensive, at constant risk of failure or cyberattack.”

Defra has estimated that it needs to spend £726 million on modernising legacy services between 2021 and 2025, and that fully transforming its digital systems could save £20 million to £25 million every year.

In August 2023, Defra awarded a £74 million, two-year contract to UK tech consultancy risual to develop new citizen-facing digital services across several of the department’s key programmes.