The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has signed a £12 million ($16.6m) hosting contract with AWS.
The two-year contract runs from July 2021 to June 2023 and will see the cloud giant provide a “flexible hosting environment for digital products” for GDS.
The contract was procured through the Government’s UK Volume Commitment Programme (UKVCP) which provides an 11 percent discount on a procurement covering two years.
Created in 2011, GDS is tasked with transforming the provision of online public services, including developing and maintaining services through the Gov.UK web portal.
The new deal extends a number previous agreements between the two parties and has steadily grown more valuable. GDS awarded AWS a one-year, £6.6 million ($9.1m) hosting contract in July 2020. And before that, the previous 12-month agreement in 2019 was awarded to the cloud company for £3.35 million ($4.6m). The 2017-2019 contract before that was worth just £1.11 million ($1.5m) a year.
Amazon has won a number of hosting contracts from the UK Government in recent years. NHS Scotland, NHS Track & Trace, the Ministry of Justice, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), and the Home Office have signed deals with the company since 2020 totaling more than £200m ($283m).
In Israel, AWS recently won the $1.2 billion Nimbus tender alongside Google to provide cloud services to the Israeli Government. And in the US the company is only one of two competing for the Department of Defense’s JEDI-replacing Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability program.
