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Three London boroughs are seeking a commercial partner to assist in a £1.5m project to deploy and adopt Microsoft cloud services.

Councils representing Lewisham and Southwark in south-east London and Brent in the north-west of the city are looking for a supplier that can initially provide the authorities with “common foundation-level build and configuration of Microsoft Azure and Office 365 products and services to a best-practice standard”.

“This will deliver a shared design that enables access to these services for all partners on an 'as and when required' basis,” the councils added.

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The second part of the project will focus on “application assessment and migration services” for Southwark, which needs to move data and programs out of its existing datacentre by October 2020.

The contract notice issued by the councils said that all three will have spent at least £10,000 on Azure hosting services by the end of November. From the second half of next year, usage for each of the authorities will stand at about £100,000 a year. 

Brent and Lewisham have run a shared ICT service (SICTS) since 2015, with Southwark joining the set-up in 2017.  

“The new MS Azure and Office 365 environment needs to accommodate all SICTS users so that it can host appropriate line of business applications and infrastructure services for them, in order to deliver public services,” the contract notice said.

Bids for the work, which has a budget of up to £1.5m, are open until 8 August. The councils will then assess up to five potential providers, with the winning firm due to be appointed on 13 September to a contract of up to 18 months in length.