The UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) has put out a request for "Expressions of Interest" for a managed service provider for its Enterprise IT Platform.
The contract's value is estimated to be worth between £45m ($58.25m) and £60m ($77.67m).
In the tender, the MOD states that the successful supplier/suppliers will be responsible for the delivery of "multi-tenant hybrid cloud architecture, a workload security zone and ability to extend the architecture hosted beyond the data center in subsequent delivery milestones."
The tender adds that industry partners will need to be able to operate as part of a "collaborative joint mission approach" and within an operating center where technical risk is managed "at the highest level."
The Enterprise IT Platform will operate in the SECRET Domain and will be predominantly UK-based but with some operations globally in connected and disconnected states.
The supplier will also have to handle the migration of the MOD's current C4IS system to the new Enterprise Platform while "reusing supported hardware where reasonable from the existing infrastructure." The system services 5,500 end users in the UK and overseas.
There is also the potential for a future migration of "at least two additional IT systems" onto the new platform. The initial contract will span five years, with two additional option years.
The MOD will host an "engagement and networking event" in September with potential suppliers.
The locations of MOD data centers are not specified in the tender, though a case study from Net Consulting described the department as having a "vast, disparate data center infrastructure, with physical sites scattered across the British Isles, along with some use of the Cloud as well."
According to that case study, the department went through a rationalization process that involved exiting some of the legacy data centers and removing obsolete equipment.
In 2015, Infiniti IT was contracted to develop a data center for the MOD in Aldershot, Hampshire.
The MOD released a cloud strategy in February 2023, which set out an "explicit intent to coordinate and accelerate the most ambitious plans for hyperscale cloud adoption across Defence." In September 2023, DCD reported that the department was experiencing issues caused by its aging IT systems.
At the time, the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) had a portfolio of more than 740 million items in its inventory including weapons, spare parts, and raw materials valued at £11.8 billion ($14.59bn). A report from the National Audit Office found that the IT infrastructure used to manage these items was causing problems - with the core inventory systems being 40 years old.
