The UK's Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) has published a tender for "future hosting and storage services."

The tender, published August 8, values the contract at £294.6 million ($396.42m).

The winner(s) of the award will provide "digital services" to six organizations within Defra: Authority; Environment Agency; Rural Payments Agency; Animal and Plant Health Agency; Natural England; and Marine Management Organisation; and includes data center facilities management, cloud hosting services, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service.

The contract will run from August 2026, to July 2031, and has two optional extension years.

Applicants have until September 4, 2025, with Defra expecting to select between three and five suppliers.

The tender follows on from a pipeline notice shared earlier this year, which then valued the contract at £226.8m ($306.06m).

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."

In March 2023, the department signed a three-year contract with Amazon Web Services that saw the cloud giant provide Defra with cloud hosting, its ‘bring-your-own-license’ software management service, and 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.