Crown Hosting Data Centres has won a £1.2 million ($1.66 million) data center contract from Genomics England (GEL).
The published tender shows Corsham-based Crown Hosting providing Genomics England with ‘data center services’ for 32 months, running from July 2021 to February 2024.
Owned by the Department for Health, GEL was set up in 2013 to sequence the genomes of 100,000 NHS patients with rare diseases and cancers. In 2018 the project was expanded with the aim of sequencing five million genomes within five years. The data collected is shared with medical research groups, with current research projects including studies into various cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and blood disorders.
GEL says it holds the data in a 'secure government-owned facility based in the UK.' The organization’s supplier list also includes UKCloud, AWS, and Azure, all described as providing ‘hosting and storage of personal and special category data.' GEL also names Weka.io as a data center provider, but the firm provides HPC storage to on-premise or cloud deployments.
Crown Hosting Data Centres was set up as a joint venture by Ark and the Cabinet Office to provide colocation services to public sector bodies and government departments.
The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has signed a £27 million ($38.1 million) contract extension with Crown Hosting Data Centres in June, which will run to May 2026. The company also won more than £3 million ($4.2 million) from the UK’s HM Land Registry across two tenders in February and March.
While some departments need on-premise hosting, many UK Government departments are signing large cloud contracts as part of digital transformation and cost-cutting efforts. In recent months the NHS, Ministry of Justice, HMRC, and Home Office have all signed multi-million-pound contracts with AWS for cloud hosting services.
