Crown Commercial Service as the contracting authority is putting in place a Pan Government Collaborative Framework Agreement for use by UK public sector bodies identified at VI.3) (and any future successors to these organisations), which include Central Government Departments and their arm’s length bodies and agencies, non departmental public bodies, NHS bodies and local authorities. This will be a route to market for eligible user organisations to procure their scalable cloud hosting requirements as more specifically described in section II.2.4).

The main purpose of this framework agreement is to put in place a route for UK public sector organisations (Buyers) to buy their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) requirements directly from the owners of public cloud platforms (Suppliers).

The scope is necessarily restricted to ‘pure’ compute requirements which do not require additional services such as design, detailed configuration, tailoring or any ongoing management or professional services to assist with data migration in/out. The services can most simply and usefully be thought of as a commodity ‘utility’ service where Buyers connect to and and use the Supplier’s platform and processing resources for their own requirements, subject to acceptable use policies and compliance with law. Examples could include the development of new software applications or to manipulate large sets of data such as weather prediction or modelling medical scenarios, and particularly the ability for the services to be rapidly scalable at short notice.

This framework agreement will offer self-serve functionality to Buyers with the protection of appropriate and robust contract conditions which have been specially developed for this purpose.

Bidders should note the following key requirements to participate in the procurement of this framework agreement:

1) you must have full and exclusive control of the infrastructure which underpins the platform used to provide the services;

2) you must use the Public Cloud Deployment Model here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf to provide the services;

3) you must be capable of providing the services primarily from within the UK (where specifically required by Buyers);

4) you must be able to offer a platform availability of 99.9 % across an all day every day baseline;

5) you must provide one example of a contract where you have delivered services using the Public Cloud Deployment Model to a customer organisation (public or private sector) in Europe during the last 3 years.

Please refer to Framework Schedule 2 (Services) for the full scope of the services.