There’s been a lot of publicity about how the Crown Hosting Data Centres service represents a pendulum shift for government that’s set to generate up to £105 million of savings to the public purse.

But it’s also a momentous step forward in another sense. Because now any public sector organisation, regardless of size, can benefit from low cost data centre services and access a wide variety of cloud services on campus.

For the very first time, the Crown Hosting Data Centre procurement framework levels the playing field and makes it possible for any sized publically funded organisation to benefit from low cost secure colocation hosting and connectivity services.

Because, under the framework agreement even the smallest public entity gets to benefit from aggregated government volume discounts and power at cost.

So, a local council with just one rack will pay identically favourable pricing as a large central government agency. Great news for those organisations previously too small to take advantage of ‘bulk buying’ price breaks.

But that’s not all. The framework agreement ensures every public sector organisation gets to enjoy the same high performance and feature rich data centre and connectivity services normally affordable only to central government.

So, let’s take a look at how everyone, no matter what their size, gains:

• There’s no requirement for a full tender, OJEU or selection procedure – simply call off the services you need – all the contract terms are already in place
• All pre-approved carbon efficiency, connectivity and security accreditations are already in place – a service already trusted by high security public sector customers
• Transparent pay-for-what-you-use pricing, with a minimum volume commitment of only one rack for one month.
• A flexible choice of contract terms – from one month to seven years – and you can terminate early without charge
• Scale up or down as required – and there’s no need to worry about contract terms if you decide to enable cloud services
• Benefit from a fixed efficiency drives quantifiable carbon savings.

The benefits don’t end there. Alongside low cost-per-rack colocation services, smaller government and public sector organisations also gain the assurance of knowing they’ll share dedicated public sector halls that feature highly reliable power and cooling, plus state-of-the-art backup and disaster recovery structures – and a choice of affordable telco services.

Even better, our smart hands technicians are on hand 24/7 to help customers identify faults, enable swaps, additions and changes. And we’re experienced at completing customer deployments in just days – not months. So, no matter how large or small your public sector organisation is, there’s finally a solution that offers equality to all.

Peter McShane