17 170 Provision of a Secure Resilient Internet Connection

Cheshire East ICT Services currently manage both Cheshire East Council (CEC) and Cheshire West and Chester (CWaC) Councils LAN and WAN infrastructure across the Cheshire footprint for all corporate and some school sites. This includes connectivity to the internet. Currently a 5GB Internet connectivity is provided under a contract with JaNET at the Chester University Riverside Campus site.

As part of the ICT strategy CEC, CWaC and Cheshire East ICT Services have chosen to implement a hybrid approach to cloud services. This will place a greater reliance on an internet service.

An options appraisal has been carried out and the agreed option to proceed with, is that the first phase of Resilient Internet Service is to concentrate on resilience for the full Office 365 suite (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online (including One Drive for Business) and in the future for Skype for Business), providing 99.99% availability for the O365 applications, inbound basic web hosting and outbound internet access. It will also provide resilience for in case of a Janet link failure.

We will be asking for prices and evaluating the quality aspects of each of these requirements and awarding to the Most Economically Advantageous Tender