The UK's Crown Hosting Data Centres (CHDC) has been awarded a contract with the Bank of England for information storage colocation services.
CDCH, a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and UK operator Art Data Centres, has won the colocation contract, which will last seven years and is valued at more than £22 million ($27.41m), reports Tech Market View.
The JV is dedicated to providing data center services to the UK public sector.
The original Crown Hosting framework agreement for data center colocation for public sectors was signed with CHDC in 2015.
A second hosting agreement was made in October 2022 called "Crown Hosting II." The second iteration extended its scope to include migration support, a hybrid infrastructure offering, and access to the framework for system integrator partners.
The second framework agreement coincided with double-digit growth for CHDC in 2023, with revenue increasing by 28.6 percent and profits by 10 percent.
CHDC explains its significant 2023 growth as “more eligible entities [using] Crown Hosting for their data center requirements.”
Customers included the London Ambulance Service, the NHS Arden Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit, the Crown Commercial Service, the Ministry of Justice, and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency.
At that time, the company was led by Steve Hall as CEO. January of this year saw the company introduce Jason Liggins, ex-CTO of Ark Data Centres, as the new CEO.
Ark Data Centres was founded in 2005 and operates data centers across the UK. In March 2023, Morrison & Co. was exploring an acquisition of the data center provider.
The Bank of England has previously noted the risks of the financial sector relying too heavily on cloud providers. In 2021, it said that the "secretive" companies and contracts could become a threat to financial stability. The following year, the UK financial watchdog announced that it would visit and regulate cloud data centers.
Earlier this year, the BoE announced that it was implementing a new operation resilience regime that would impact cloud providers as it would "bring some other parties within the scope of our oversight powers for the first time."
The operational regime was motivated by "lessons we have learned from previous disruption at third-party service providers impacting multiple firms."
Several UK-based banks use cloud services, having migrated away from on-premise data centers. HSBC has agreements with Google and Microsoft, and in 2020 signed a long-term deal with AWS. Lloyds has a dedicated "Cloud Centre of Excellence" provided by Microsoft and Google, and NatWest is using multiple Google Cloud products.
In 2022, Microsoft purchased a stake in the London Stock Exchange Group, which saw the financial company migrate its operations to the Azure cloud platform.
