AWS to cash in on FCA deal

Cloud giant wins deal worth up to £5m with Financial Conduct Authority

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has won a deal worth up to £5m to give the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) a cloudy makeover.

According to a recently published contract-award notice, the cloud giant won the Provision of Cloud Hosting Services contract, which will be worth between £2.5m and £5m over its five-year lifetime.

The FCA regulates the conduct of more than 70,000 business and was set up in 1997, when it was known as the Financial Services Authority.

The body said in the award notice that it is moving towards cloud as part of its technology strategy.

"The FCA is seeking to leverage mature cloud IT capabilities in order to improve service value and control risk," the notice said.

"This forms part of the FCA technology strategy where there is a desire to use infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service capabilities (PaaS).

"It is therefore looking to secure a cloud hosting services provider to support both new FCA solution demand and be able to service existing and legacy applications migrated to a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) estate.

"The objective of this procurement is to secure a hosting service provider with sufficient depth of core capabilities, breadth of value-add services, established licensing arrangements and competitive pricing positions."

Twelve offers were received for the deal and AWS was successful.