The UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) has put out a pipeline notice for the provision of "Future Hosting and Storage Services" worth £226.8m ($306.06m).

According to the notice, Defra is seeking services including the "provisioning and management of data center based on-premise and private cloud infrastructure."

The contract will run from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2031, with a possible extension to June 30, 2032. The official tender notice is expected to be published on June 17, 2025.

Defra previously issued a similar notice for hosting and storage services in September 2024, under a contract valued at £153.7m ($202.07m). It is unclear if this latest notice is an extension of the previous one, or if it is a new hosting contract altogether.

Defra has long been seeking to modernize its IT operations, after a December 2022 report from the National Audit Office (NAO) found that many of its services were based on "aging IT systems and Infrastructure," adding that "across the whole of government, aging IT systems are a key source of inefficiency and create a major constraint to improving and modernizing government services."

That report estimated that Defra would need ten years for a full transformation of its business applications.

The department's data center suffered a four-day outage in May 2024.

Defra previously signed a £20.8 million ($25m) deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) spanning three years in March 2023.

Under the deal, AWS was providing Defra with cloud hosting, its ‘bring-your-own-license’ software management service, and with the cloud giant offering support, managed and professional services, and training to Defra employees.

This year so far has seen Defra sign deals with BT, to provide 34,000 connections for workers and a range of devices, from water sensors to payment machines, and Kyndryl to help reduce its technical debt as part of a cloud adoption project.