BC/DR co-location and connectivity

Moat Homes Limited considers that this direct award is permitted, relying on the direct award justifications for single supplier - technical reasons and extreme and unavoidable urgency.

In relation to the single supplier technical reasons justification, Moat already has established disaster recovery and Business Continuity (DR/BC) co-location services in place with CustodianDC. The proposed contract is, in substance, an extension of that existing arrangement to address a material resilience risk at our sites and to deliver a coherent, end-to-end DR/BC and hosting solution. The current production and DR/BC environments are designed, hosted and operated as an integrated solution with Custodian. Introducing an alternative supplier at this point would require substantial re-engineering, data migration and re-testing of the Authority's infrastructure and failover arrangements. This would create disproportionate technical and operational difficulty and significantly increase the risk of disruption to critical services. In practice, there are no reasonable alternative solutions that could be implemented within the required timescales without incurring those risks, and for technical reasons, only CustodianDC is capable of supplying the required services at this time.

In relation to the extreme and unavoidable urgency justification, Moat has recently identified and experienced a significant degradation in the resilience of the infrastructure supporting one of our sites. As a consequence, there is now a heightened and credible risk of an unplanned loss of service if the current arrangements are not urgently remediated. Taking into account the time needed to define requirements, run a compliant competitive process, appoint a new supplier and then transition and stabilise services, Moat has concluded that it is not possible to complete a competitive tendering procedure and implement an alternative solution within the time available to mitigate that risk. The services to be procured under this contract are limited to what is necessary to address the immediate resilience risk and ensure continuity of services while a longer-term solution is developed and, where appropriate, competitively procured. In these circumstances, a direct award to CustodianDC is considered necessary for reasons of extreme and unavoidable urgency and cannot reasonably be achieved through an open or competitive flexible procedure within the required timeframe.