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https://digitalmarketplace.blog.gov.uk/2015/08/03/how-the-national-audit-office-used-the-digital-marketplace-for-buying-cloud-services-under-the-g-cloud-framework/

How the National Audit Office used the Digital Marketplace to buy cloud services

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NAO

The Digital Marketplace made the procurement process simpler, clearer and faster for the National Audit Office. Nick Halliday explains how.

Describe your role

As a digital architect at the National Audit Office (NAO), I’m responsible for the NAO website.

Explain the project

The NAO website is built in WordPress and the team wanted to source cloud hosting and support for the site. Via the Digital Marketplace and through the G-Cloud framework, we found a supplier that specialised in web projects for the public sector.

Describe the challenges you've overcome

Since buying cloud services via the Digital Marketplace using G-Cloud, we’ve:

  • taken the leap from traditional hosting to cloud hosting
  • moved from off-the-shelf to open source software for our website
  • minimised the cost that’s incurred by an overly complex procurement process

How using G-Cloud and the Digital Marketplace made the project simpler, clearer and faster

It was important to the NAO to have the assurance that suppliers had been vetted and due diligence had been carried out. When we’d completed the process, the biggest benefits we found were:

  • the website performance significantly improved when we started using cloud hosting
  • procuring through G-Cloud on the Digital Marketplace instead of running a large procurement exercise saved us a lot of time
  • an integrated hosting and support contract provided assurance for us that we were not on our own whilst we implemented a significant change in infrastructure

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