Ministry of Justice signs £14m cloud deal

Whitehall continues slow move to the cloud...

The Ministry of Justice will host its new ERP system on a cloud platform known as GWSPhoto: Shutterstock

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has signed a deal to become the second Whitehall department to host IT systems on the GWS cloud computing platform.

The MoJ will host its new ERP system on a cloud infrastructure known as Government Wide Service (GWS), provided by Savvis, as part of a five-year £14m deal.

The Home Office also hosts applications on GWS, an infrastructure that provides remote access to systems on a pay-per-use basis and is accredited to the government IL3 security standard.

The MoJ's ERP system, which is being designed by Steria and implemented by Accenture, will deliver transactional and professional services to more than 80,000 users, and is scheduled to be fully operational by spring 2013.

The Oracle ERP system is being implemented as part of a shared-services programme at the MoJ, which will consolidate multiple legacy data systems and is expected to deliver £28m savings each year from 2013.

Whitehall departments are engaged in the G-Cloud project, which involves a gradual shift to accessing IT services from the cloud.

Speaking at a recent conference, Department for Culture, Media and Sport CIO Mark O'Neill said cloud computing will transform the way government uses IT by opening up access to online services capable of outperforming and undercutting bespoke alternatives from its suppliers.