Red Kite Community Housing - IT Managed Services

Red Kite currently has an IT Managed Service Contract which expires on 31st March 2027 and are now seeking to award a new Contract. It is expected that the Successful Bidder will be appointed by the end of 2026 and that the new Contract must be operationally live no later than 1st April 2027.

The current hosting arrangements are located in the current supplier’s data centre and delivered as a private cloud solution with the core infrastructure belonging to the current supplier. These core assets will not be transferable and therefore a new solution must be provided by the Successful Bidder.

The new Contract shall include:

•Technical architecture and design

•Onboarding of all services in-scope of the Solution

•First-, Second- and Third-Line Service Desk

•Full inventory management service for all ICT assets

•Capacity management

•Developing appropriate refresh cycles for all equipment

•Hosting, including support the VMware servers and associated storage

•24x365 Proactive monitoring of all core ICT services

•Security infrastructure including Firewall Management

•Security Operations Centre (SOC) which is staffed 24x7

•Assistance to promote security best practice throughout Red Kite

•Resilient connectivity between Red Kite’s Head Office and the hosting service

•Resilient Internet connectivity

•Local Wired and Wireless Area Networks (Switches and Wireless Access Points are assets belonging to Red Kite)

•End-user support providing an engineer on-site at Head Office for 3 days per week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). The engineer will primarily handle first-line Tickets to resolution but may also be required to participate in project work if and when there is insufficient support work to be undertaken

•Building of new end-user devices (laptops) and maintenance of these builds; the supply of end-user devices is not in-scope of this Tender and end-user devices are Red Kite’s assets

•Patching (as a minimum to Cyber Essentials Plus standards)

•Backup including:

o Private/Public cloud hosted services

o Office 365 services including Email, OneDrive and SharePoint

o Dynamics 365

•Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

•Monthly Service Reports and Meetings

• On-site first-line engineer (3 days per week)

•Ad-hoc project days (60 days per annum)

•Rate Card for ad-hoc work

Full details of the Services required are contained in the Technical Statement of Requirements as set out in Appendix 1 of the ITT document.

The Contract will last for an initial period of 3 years, with an option to extend at Red Kite’s discretion for a period of 1 year, plus 1 additional year, and 1 final year, giving a total potential period of 6 years.