The UK's Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) has put out a Prior Information Notice for future hosting and storage services.

In a notice published on August 23, Defra shared that it was seeking hosting and storage services that would include the provisioning and management of data centers based on-premise and private cloud infrastructure.

First reported by Digit News and Public Technology, Defra is seeking a supplier that will help the department to "ensure high availability, scalability, and security of our data and applications."

This notice adds that the deal “will include but are not limited to: infrastructure services; platform services; data center facilities management and site services; distributed… comms rooms server management; general services, [such as] service catalog and foundation services; [and] cloud engineering services.”

The contract is estimated to be worth £128.1m ($168.41m), or £153.7m ($202.07m) including VAT.

Defra is hosting a supplier briefing presentation on September 6 that will offer potential bidders additional information on the current hosting and storage arrangements and the department's plans for the future.

In December 2022, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report looking at Defra's IT setup, noting that many of its services were based on "aging IT systems and Infrastructure," adding that "across the whole of government, aging IT systems are a key source of inefficiency and create a major constraint to improving and modernizing government services."

That report estimated that Defra would need 10 years for a full transformation of its business applications.

In 2023, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, deputy chair of the Public Accounts Committee which had also conducted a review of Defra's IT infrastructure, said: “Defra’s IT systems are so outmoded and disconnected that in some cases the professionals who keep our food, water, and air safe have been forced to buy obsolete equipment just to fill in the forms to fulfill their regulatory responsibilities.”

In March 2023, Defra signed a £20.8 million (~$25m) deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) spanning three years.

Under the deal, AWS is providing Defra with cloud hosting, its ‘bring-your-own-license’ software management service, and will see the cloud giant offering support, managed and professional services, and training to Defra employees.

In May of this year, a Defra data center suffered a four-day power outage.