The CCS (UK’s Crown Commercial Service) has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Google Cloud that will grant the UK Public Sector huge discounts on all Googles Cloud services.

The deal is part of the Governments continuing push for a multi-cloud programme that will empower Digital Transformation in the UK without the need to rely on just one supplier.

The CCS is the UK Cabinet Office’s exec agency and trading fund and has been working tirelessly to add new suppliers to the British Cloud Services market with the goal of providing the best value for money to all public sector departments.

When asked, Google Cloud commented to say that the deal would allow local councils, government departments, and National Health Service (NHS) to get a discount on Google's cloud services based on their estimated spending on Google's cloud platform for next two years.

The deal features a host of Googles services including analytics, AI, infrastructure collaboration solutions, and application development as well as their serverless and managed offerings such as their hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform (although the last two are thought to be available to Government departments only as part of the deal).

AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft already have similar agreements within the UK, so this deal now makes available all the major players in the sector of Cloud-based services.

It was only a month or two ago that Microsoft signed a deal with the Government offering all eligible public sector organisations discounted access to Microsoft Azure business tools.

Whilst Google is currently a distant third in terms of market share, (behind Microsoft and AWS) this move may bring them closer to closing that gap.