New Scottish Government cloud services framework has a forecast value of £30m 

A new Scottish Government framework for cloud services has been published with 14 suppliers able to bid for contracts worth a forecast £30m.

The multi-supplier agreement, which is open to over 300 public and third sector organisations in Scotland, replaces the old hosting services framework, which expired in May.

The ‘in-scope’ services are:

-Public cloud (including access to hyper-scale public cloud)
-Private cloud
-Co-location
-Hybrid cloud
-Community cloud
-Cloud transition services

A number of the suppliers announced on the new list, which went live on Friday, issued press releases today (MON) to celebrate their inclusion after the Scottish Government’s procurement directorate released the news on social media including LinkedIn.

Brightsolid, the Scottish colocation and cloud solutions company, will offer enterprise, private, public and hybrid cloud solutions and associated services, ‘working collaboratively with organisations to meet their IT needs’.

Elaine Maddison, CEO at Brightsolid, said: “We are pleased to offer our continued support to the Scottish Government following three years of successfully working with Scottish public sector organisations under the hosting services framework. The strong portfolio of cloud services we offer customers provides them with future-proof infrastructures to support digital transformation whilst considering the long-term financial implications – a testament to the feedback we have since received.”

Lanarkshire-based DataVita, Scotland’s leading datacentre and multi-cloud services provider, were also included on the two-year framework, which can extend to four years.

Datavita will offer public sector organisations – including local authorities, education providers, the NHS and emergency services, and the third sector – access to a range of cloud services delivered via its purpose-built, Uptime Institute Tier III certified datacentre, which is powered by 100% green energy.

Danny Quinn, managing director of DataVita said: “We are proud to be working with a number of public bodies already; however, inclusion in this new framework will be invaluable in helping to increase the opportunities for DataVita, as an SME competing in the public sector. 

“Given the sensitive nature of some of the data held in the public sector, as well as the regulatory requirements around its control, we have decided to introduce a dedicated data hall, which will allow public sector organisations to benefit from a number of unique, advanced controls. We hope this will support secure and seamless collaboration between departments, while achieving maximum efficiencies for our customers.” 

UKCloud, which has supported more than 250 digital transformation projects across public sector via various Crown Commercial Service frameworks including Technology Services 2 (TS2) and G-Cloud – will also be on the framework.

Leighton James, CTO at UKCloud, said: “UKCloud has always been known for the award-winning public cloud platform that we’ve created within the government-grade Crown Campus. Now, we’re able to take our public cloud architecture and deploy that as a private cloud – in your datacentre, in Crown Hosting or in our own facilities. And this year, we’ve delivered our first services that span between our own platform and 3rd party platforms such as Microsoft Azure. From multi-cloud to multi-classification and multi-deployment – we’re providing choices and options that you can’t get from anyone else.”

The framework supports and enables a number of digital initiatives, specifically: Scotland’s Digital Strategy – Realising Scotland’s full potential in a digital world, and Data Hosting and Data Centre Strategy for the Scottish Public Sector.

Suppliers:

• Brightsolid
• DataVita
• CAE Technology Services
• Insight Direct UK
• Iomart
• Nigsun Limited
• NVT Group
• Proact IT UK
• Pulsant
• Six Degrees
• Storm ID
• Sungard
• UK Cloud
• Velocity