The UK government is on a mission to help public sector IT buyers do away with their legacy tech and migrate more of their workloads to the cloud, with the help of a soon-to-be-launched purpose-built procurement marketplace. But haven’t we heard all this before?
The UK government is on a mission to help public sector IT buyers do away with their legacy tech and migrate more of their workloads to the cloud, with the help of a soon-to-be-launched purpose-built procurement marketplace. But haven’t we heard all this before?
The UK government is on a mission to loosen the grip that legacy IT suppliers have on public sector IT budgets, amid concerns about how police forces, NHS trusts and local councils are wedded to suppliers whose offerings are not good value for money.
Technology secretary Peter Kyle outlined the government’s ambitions on this front during his appearance at the Google Cloud London Summit in July 2025, where he talked about the need to rid the public sector of the “ball and chain” of legacy tech and migrate more of their applications and workloads to the cloud. He said it is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s (DSIT’s) intention to “drag” public sector IT into the 21st century by forging closer ties with cloud giants, such as Google.
“My message to big tech companies is clear: bring us your best ideas, bring us your best tech, and bring it at the best price, and – in return – you’ll get access to the biggest client in the country [the public sector], one that will be increasingly intelligent and increasingly digital,” he said.
But it is not just the tech offered by the hyperscale cloud giants that government wants public sector organisations to escape to, Kyle continued. He is also keen for UK-based tech suppliers of all sizes to win their fair share of public sector contracts through their participation in the National Digital Exchange (NDX) marketplace.
Announced in June 2025, the NDX platform is expected to provide public sector organisations with access to pre-approved technology deals at nationally negotiated prices, while also allowing buyers to rate and review the services they procure through it.
Pitched as an app store for public sector organisations, the government said NDX will play a key role in supporting its goal of boosting small business involvement in government contracts by 40% within three years. DSIT claims the platform will unlock £1.2bn a year in savings and modernise how public sector spends £26m a year on technology.
“The National Digital Exchange will make sure more and more UK tech companies can get their slice of [public sector IT spend],” said Kyle. “That means more money for companies operating here in the UK, [including] workers and founders.
“It will help us achieve the economic growth upon which Britain’s future prosperity lies, and it will improve the public services on which British systems depend.”History repeating
In summary, the government wants public sector buyers to save money by ditching legacy providers and moving to the cloud, while offering them access to an online marketplace where they can easily procure the products and services they need from both hyperscale, overseas tech firms and homegrown providers.
For those who have followed the public sector IT market for the past 15 years or so, some of what the government is proposing may sound familiar, as the founding aims of NDX are very similar to those of the G-Cloud framework.
The latter purchasing agreement made its debut in 2012, pitched as a procurement vehicle that would increase the diversity of IT providers serving public sector organisations and would boost the number of small and medium-sized IT suppliers winning business with them.
At the time, the IT supplier landscape was dominated by a handful of systems integrators and large, legacy tech providers that stood accused of locking public sector organisations into lengthy and expensive contracts.
