Credit: Mudassar Iqbal/Pixabay

HM Revenue and Customs has invested £2m in software to help assess and manage its spending with various cloud providers.

The department has awarded a two-year deal for access to “a cloud FinOps” tool, newly published commercial documents reveal. An abbreviation of “financial operations”, FinOps has emerged in recent years as a method employed by organisations to help manage their use of cloud computing and the money spent on the technology.

According to the website of the FinOps Foundation – created in 2020 by non-profit tech group the Linux Foundation – FinOps is “a cultural practice… for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group”.

“FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions,” the site added.

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The contract notice published by HMRC indicates that the tax agency is seeking to use a specialised software platform to support its adoption of FinOps methodology.

The tax agency has awarded a contract to IT firm SoftwareONE, which will provide a technology tool designed to allow the department “to effectively govern, control and manage its multi-cloud provider spend [and] to enable visibility into our cloud spend so that we can drive more efficient consumption and optimise costs”.

The deal will come into effect on 1 February 2023 and run for 24 months. The engagement is valued at £1.8m plus VAT.

SoftwareONE’s website indicates that it has been awarded an official Service Provider certification by the FinOps Foundation and, in addition to various technology tools, also employs more than 200 experts in the field. 

Procurement archives indicate that the deal signed by HMRC is only the fourth contract related to FinOps awarded by a public body. In 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care signed a trio of contracts – cumulatively worth £130,000 – for consultancy services related to the cloud-management practice.