NHS England is preparing to go to market for an infrastructure and security partner to support it with physical hosting, M365 support, security and more, as part of efforts to join up separate workloads.
A contract notice for the work -- worth an estimated £1.5 million -- is due to land on July 1, a prior information notice reveals. The opportunity will be procured through through the Crown Commercial Services Technology Services 3 Framework, RM6100 and comes as two existing "end-to-end" ICT contracts expire in 2022.
The pending contract comes as part of NHS England's "Future Services Programme".
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This has broken workloads into "towers" with each tower delivering a distinct IT service. Four of five towers have been procured ("Service Desk", "End User Services", "Networks", and "Applications Management".)
As the PIN reveals, the pending opportunity is for the "delivery of Infrastructure and Security capabilities to develop, manage and support Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, private cloud/physical hosting environments, (some of which are on-premise and some of which are in a co-location datacentres) as well as a Security/Technical Operations Centre, security services and security operations."
The tender submission deadline is tentatively slated for August 5, 2021.
The healthcare behemoth says it needs help with service integration and management, infrastructure, cloud and platform support, along with support for physical hosting, M365, applications catalogue and packaging security, IAM, and security and threat monitoring.
