The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has retained CGI for the hosting of a line of digital business applications in a deal to run until May 2025 at a value of just under £40 million.
They have agreed on a contract for the management of assets such as physical and virtual servers, firewalls and storage infrastructure without any call for competition, which the MoJ has justified by citing technical reasons.
The deal has been agreed in anticipation of a major infrastructure refresh at the ministry, which makes it complex and uneconomical to switch to another service providers in the short term.
According to the contract award notice, most of the assets are at least 10 years-old, with replacement parts being scarce and a shortage of expertise to provide support. This would make it difficult to migrate them without a lot of work on the software.
Mitigating risk
“There are applications that have business value and work to carry out this remediation in-situ and migration to an alternative hosting solution has already started and needs to continue,” the notice says. “Migrating these applications before carrying out remediation work requires a double-hop migration which would result in a significant risk of service failure and costs.
“Other applications that will retire within the contract term will be decommissioned in place rather than incur significant time, cost, technical difficulty and technical risk in moving the applications and then decommissioning them.”
It adds that the hosting environment, including all the physical technology, will be retired during the life of the new contract.
In 2020 the MoJ renewed another contract with CGI, for application maintenance and support services, citing similar reasons.
It has a digital strategy aimed at reducing technical debt, with a reduction of reliance on legacy systems, and automating processes where possible.
