Public and third sector organisations that want to purchase high volume cloud hosting solutions flexibly can now do so through a new £750m Crown Commercial Service (CCS) framework called Cloud Compute.
Nine cloud service suppliers have been chosen by the UK government procurement body to support customers' requirements.
The new agreement covers IaaS and PaaS requirements.
As part of the tender process, bidders were asked to provide evidence of how they would support customers to achieve social value through their contracts, boosting sustainability and economic equality.
“CCS will continue to work with suppliers on this agreement to understand and reduce the public sector’s carbon emissions footprint through cloud adoption, in line with the Government’s carbon net zero commitments,” it said.
Cloud Compute complements the G-Cloud framework which has shorter call-off terms and a wider pool of suppliers able to offer more diverse services.
Cloud Compute focuses on flexible (or hyperscale) compute environments, used for the development of new software applications or where large and complex data sets need to be modelled, for instance.
Being able to rapidly scale up or down the service offered is 'crucial', said CCS, as this is unavailable through G-Cloud.
The new framework will run for four years and is available to the whole public and third sector. Call-off terms are up to three years, with two possible extensions of up to 12 months each.
The following suppliers have been awarded places on the framework: Amazon Web Services EMEA, Fordway Solutions, Frontier Technology, Google Ireland, IBM UK, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation UK, UKCloud and UKFast.net.
The Cloud Compute framework is one of a number of more focused frameworks introduced by CCS. These include the Automation Marketplace DPS (Dynamic Purchasing System) and the Artificial Intelligence DPS - both of which went live last year - and the upcoming Big Data and Analytics framework and Cloud Services DPS.