Databarracks provides Resilience and Cloud Services to public sector organisations including: Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, Environment Agency, Innovate UK and UK Research and Innovation.

James Watts, Managing Director of Databarracks comments: "The framework comes at a difficult time for government spending and procurement. Efficiency and value for money are critical. The benefits of shorter contracts and nimble SME suppliers can help reduce costs and keep public services delivering.

"The move to G-Cloud 13 has been one of the more significant iterations. G-Cloud 12 was extended multiple times to allow for the transition and the shift to the Crown Commercial Service Public Procurement Gateway.

"For all the good intentions behind G-Cloud, there have always been challenges. G-Cloud 13 has had a rocky start after launching without supplier transparency over the search process, which has rightly received backlash from the supplier community. That feature is promised to be reintroduced shortly. On the buyer side, it is vital they are well-informed about the changes and updates to the programme and new procurement gateway to make sure momentum does not stall between these frameworks.

"In our experience, since G-Cloud was first introduced, the biggest change in buyer interest has been in the hyperscale public clouds, specifically AWS and Microsoft Azure. In the early days of the platform buyers were reticent, but when the hyperscalers showed commitment and opened UK data centre regions there was a turning point. Since then, public cloud adoption in the public sector has rocketed.

"When using the public cloud, there is still a great deal of value to be gained by using specialist cloud service providers to get the most from these platforms.

"Interest has moved from Lots 1 & 2 for Cloud Hosting and Cloud Software to Lot 3 - Cloud Support. That means cloud design and architecture services, on-going DevOps and management. Cost optimisation, capacity and demand management will all be vital to the public sector during this iteration of G-Cloud."