The UK government has signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft to help public sector organisations continue to unlock the benefits of cloud computing and business applications.
The MoU is titled “Digital Transformation Agreement 2021” and allows all eligible public sector organisations to benefit from discounts and beneficial terms for Microsoft 365, Azure, and for the first time, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform cloud services.
The agreement renews the existing DTA MoU as a three-year agreement and will run from May 1 2021 to April 2024. It was negotiated between the tech giant and the Crown Commercial Service.
The relationship between the tech giant and the government has become increasingly focused on cloud services since the latter launched its Cloud First policy in 2013 which was reassessed in 2019 and remains a flagship technology policy, according to Microsoft.
“This new agreement with Microsoft builds on the government’s One Government Cloud Strategy, which supports the key principle of treating government as one single customer,” said Gareth Rhys Williams, the government chief commercial officer.
“It shows the government’s determination to drive transformation as well as adopt value for money technologies that improve services and ensure government departments and their staff have the digital tools they need, now and in the future.”
This isn’t the only company to have signed an MoU with the government. AWS signed one in November last year to help accelerate the public sector’s digital transformation drive and raise the level of participation among smaller cloud providers.
In June last year, UKCloud signed an MoU to allow the company to offer its services to the public sector either directly or indirectly through its partner community. The month before that, Google Cloud signed a similar agreement to provide cloud computing to the country’s public sector agencies.
The agreement, which isn’t legally binding, was set to make it easier and more affordable for public sector agencies to access the full range of Google Cloud services for digital transformation.