17 171 Provision of a High Bandwidth and Low Latency Cloud Access Connection

Cheshire East ICT Services currently manage both Cheshire East Council (CEC) and Cheshire West and Chester (CWaC) councils LAN and WAN infrastructure across the Cheshire footprint for all corporate and some school sites. This includes connectivity to the internet. Currently a 5GB Internet connectivity is provided under a contract with JaNET at the Chester University Riverside Campus site.

As part of the ICT strategy CEC, CWaC and Cheshire East ICT Services have chosen to implement a hybrid approach to cloud services. This will place a greater reliance on an internet service.

We are looking to commence hosting more services in the Cloud using initially Microsoft Azure to provide resilience for those services/applications that are highlighted at that time that the business requires.

We will be asking for prices and evaluating the quality aspects of the requirements and awarding to the Most Economically Advantageous Tender.