Eduserv, the not for profit public sector cloud provider, has won a contract with Bristol City Council worth an estimated £1.5m to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud.

The contract sees Eduserv take over the day to day running of the council’s IT, with future IT services being procured in a much more flexible manner, ensuring the council doesn’t own much of its ICT.

Bristol City Council is planning on cutting about £90m in IT costs, as local governments continue to move their resources to the cloud.

“Like every council, we are faced with the challenge of delivering high quality services while reducing our costs by 30%”, said Steven Pendleton, service manager of commissioning and supplier relationship management at Bristol City Council.

He added: “The ICT market is changing rapidly, becoming much more commoditised and consumer led, where significant economies of scale are now possible.

“Moving our IT estate to the cloud will give us a more flexible cost-effective resource which can adapt to our changing needs.”

With recent news that the Digital Marketplace, the updated one stop shop for government cloud services, is close to being prepared, the portents look good according to Eduserv, a long recognised G-Cloud vendor.

Andy Powell, head of product marketing at Eduserv, told CloudTech at the time his initial reaction to the new service, which will replace the CloudStore by the end of September, was that it had “been streamlined quite nicely”, yet added the Bath-based firm was still in a “wait and see” position.

“It’s good to see consolidation across the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks,” he added.