Cloud services for the public sector

G-Cloud 13 went live on 9 November, after a slight delay. The latest iteration replaces G-Cloud 12, provides cloud computer services to the public sector and lists 5,006 suppliers

According to Crown Commercial Service (CCS), the delay was because they were working to make their agreements easier to use and provide a better experience for their customers.

Following user testing, feedback and insight was provided that needed to be examined further before the launch of G-Cloud 13. G-Cloud 13 offers public sector organisations a straightforward and compliant way to purchase cloud-based services, including hosting, software and support.

For G-Cloud 13, more than 90 per cent of the suppliers on the framework are small and medium-sized enterprises and 72 per cent are micro and small organisations.

Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief procurement officer for technology at CCS, said: “G-Cloud has been a huge success and is popular due to the high SME inclusion and the ease with which services can be bought by customers.

“The latest iteration of the agreement will offer improved terms and conditions for customers, a wider range of competition across cloud professional support services and access to increased innovation and ideas, using state of the art technologies.”

Scope

The framework covers buying cloud-based computing services including hosting, software and cloud support, with many off-the-shelf, pay-as-you-go cloud solutions included. The new framework will continue to provide cloud hosting and software services, as well as associated support services to the UK central government departments and all other public sector bodies, including the NHS. The framework will run from 9 November 2022 until 8 November 2023. Prior to the launch of G-Cloud 13, CCS ran supplier and customer surveys, and held a supplier event and 1-to-1 supplier interviews in order to understand the needs related to buying, consuming and implementing cloud storage. In December 2021, an RFI was published to Lot 3 suppliers to gather feedback on Lot 4. As an updated framework, there are changes compared to previous iterations. Compared to previous versions, G-Cloud 13 introduces a fourth lot for further competition for cloud support services for larger, more complex requirements. The call-off term across the agreement has also changed to 36 months with an optional 12-month extension. These changes also include improved terms and conditions, with greater inclusion for the provision of day rate cloud support services and inclusion of the latest procurement policies, including social value and prompt payment.

Lots Lot 1 includes Cloud Hosting (PaaS, IaaS) and covers cloud platform or infrastructure, which enables buyers to deploy, manage and run software, and provision and use processing, storage or networking resources. Services covered by this lot include: archiving, backup and disaster recovery; compute and application hosting; container service; content delivery network; database; NoSQL database; relational database; data warehousing; load balancing; logging and analysis; message queuing and processing; networking (including Network as a Service); Platform as a Service (PaaS); infrastructure and platform security; distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) E