Section one: Contracting authority
one.1) Name and addresses
OUR FUTURE HEALTH
6 Stanley Street
SALFORD
M35GS
Contact
Curshaw Ltd (on behalf of Our Future Health)
Country
United Kingdom
NUTS code
UK - United Kingdom
Internet address(es)
Main address
https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk
one.3) Communication
Additional information can be obtained from the above-mentioned address
one.4) Type of the contracting authority
Body governed by public law
one.5) Main activity
Health
Section two: Object
two.1) Scope of the procurement
two.1.1) Title
Cloud infrastructure, trusted research environment and researcher billing
two.1.2) Main CPV code
- 72222300 - Information technology services
two.1.3) Type of contract
Services
two.1.4) Short description
Our Future Health will be the UK's largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases. To support our programme, Our Future Health will be procuring the following in early 2022:
- secure and scalable public cloud infrastructure for our technology platforms
-a trusted research environment (TRE) to enable registered to access and use data within a secure environment
- a service to manage the billing of cloud compute and storage costs for researchers using the TRE
two.1.6) Information about lots
This contract is divided into lots: Yes
Maximum number of lots that may be awarded to one tenderer: 3
The contracting authority reserves the right to award contracts combining the following lots or groups of lots:
Lot No 1) Cloud Infrastructure
Lot No 2) Trusted research environment
Lot No 3) Researcher billing
two.2) Description
two.2.1) Title
Cloud infrastructure
Lot No
1
two.2.2) Additional CPV code(s)
- 72222300 - Information technology services
two.2.3) Place of performance
NUTS codes
- UK - United Kingdom
two.2.4) Description of the procurement
Our Future Health aims to procure secure and scalable public cloud infrastructure for our technology platforms. The selected supplier will be one of our most important technology partners as we build and scale our systems. The cloud infrastructure will underpin web sites and apps used by our participants, a data store and data processing systems, a trusted research environment (TRE) and associated systems used by researchers from around the world, and underlying systems to operate and monitor the programme.
The selected supplier will provide UK hosting for secure public cloud infrastructure with a comprehensive set of standard compute, storage and infrastructure services. We are interested to work with cloud providers that have good availability of TRE providers already working within their systems.
two.2) Description
two.2.1) Title
Trusted research environment
Lot No
2
two.2.2) Additional CPV code(s)
- 72222300 - Information technology services
two.2.3) Place of performance
NUTS codes
- UK - United Kingdom
two.2.4) Description of the procurement
Our Future Health is planning to procure a trusted research environment (TRE) to enable registered researchers to access and use data within a single secure environment to conduct approved research studies. The success of Our Future Health rests on the research that is done with the data and the cohort, together with our commitment to robust security, strict governance and participant confidentiality. A TRE is an environment, that may be cloud-based, that allows registered researchers working on an approved study to conduct analysis on de-identified or pseudonymised datasets in a secure manner, where export of results data is permitted but exports of individual level data is not permitted. It is expected that a TRE will create a separate partitioned workspace for each approved study, allow registered researchers to use a variety of common tools for data science, analysis, and research (including large-scale genomic analysis), to upload additional tools and datasets subject to the security restrictions of the environment, to have flexibility in their use of compute and storage resources. A TRE should maintain the access control and secure boundary to prevent unauthorised access to or download of data, and to maintain auditable access and usage logs.
The selected TRE (lot 2) will be expected to run on the selected cloud infrastructure (lot 1), with the selected provider of researcher billing (lot 3) providing services to manage the cost and billing of cloud usage by researchers in the TRE.
We hope to award contracts in May 2022, have a beta version of a TRE tested and launched by the end of September 2022, and a full version tested and launched by the end of 2022.
two.2) Description
two.2.1) Title
Researcher billing
Lot No
3
two.2.2) Additional CPV code(s)
- 72222300 - Information technology services
two.2.3) Place of performance
NUTS codes
- UK - United Kingdom
two.2.4) Description of the procurement
In order to provide a scalable and flexible service, where researchers can use the cloud resources that they need, we anticipate a system where researchers pay for their own cloud storage and compute within their TRE workspace. We are therefore planning to procure a partner who can meet the following requirements, working together with the selected provider of public cloud infrastructure (lot 1) and the selected TRE (lot 2):
- Billing of researchers and collection of payments to be handled by a supplier or partner, not by Our Future Health.
- Our Future Health shall not be liable for the costs of researchers' compute and storage within the TRE.
- Our Future Health shall not incur data transfer charges between the primary data store and the TRE.
- Cloud pricing shall be uniform for both Our Future Health's usage and researcher usage.
two.3) Estimated date of publication of contract notice
14 February 2022
Section four. Procedure
four.1) Description
four.1.8) Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA)
The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: Yes
Section six. Complementary information
six.3) Additional information
Interested providers can register to attend a further information webinar on 7 January 2022, with more information and registration here: