The Met Office – the UK’s national meteorological service provider – is shifting its Space Weather service workloads onto AWS in a £2 million migration.
The Space Weather service tracks shifts in environmental conditions in near-Earth space, including magnetic fields, radiation, particles and matter.
A tender worth £1.5-£2 million closes March 30. The Met Office said it needs a Systems Integrator to help it make the move to “reduce operational costs for the service”.
The contract will include DevOps support of the operational Space Weather service: “The delivery partner shall undertake all evolving space weather BaU activities, alongside lifecycle management”, the Met Office said.
Space weather is high on the National Risk Register as “the impact of Space Weather events can seriously disrupt national infrastructures like power grids, radio communications and satellite operations including GPS”.
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The IT capability at the heart of this contract is the mechanism by which the forecasters for the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) visualise and manipulate observational data to produce intelligence and climate change data.
What Sort of Data Do Space Weather Systems Collect?
Once hired, the delivery partner will undertake all evolving space weather activities, alongside project management, including migration of the current operational service over to AWS.
During on-boarding the partner’s team will be expected to work onsite at the Met Office’s HQ based in Exeter before switching to work predominantly at their own corporate offices, with regular two weekly (subject to change) meetings taking place in Exeter to fit with the scrum sprint process.
AWS has emerged as one of the public sectors’ go-to vendors in recent years, with £130 million worth of public sector contracts awarded to the cloud giant via the G-Cloud procurement framework in the past 24 months
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