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  1. Government Computing
December 18, 2020

UKHO awards £30m contract to Leidos Innovations for ARDS project

The UK Home Office (UKHO) has awarded a £30m contract to Leidos Innovations for providing managed service for its Agile Data Retention and Disclosure Service (ARDS) project.

The UKHO selects Leidos Innovations for the ARDS MSP contract. (Credit: Steve Cadman/Wikipedia.org)

The vision of ARDS is to create agile data retention and disclosure services which can enable telecom operators (TOs) to be quickly on-boarded and off-boarded.

The role of Leidos Innovations under the contract will be to help the UKHO develop and deliver ARDS’ vision on its behalf. Furthermore, Leidos Innovations will manage the cloud providers as needed along with solution suppliers to help bring in innovation, agility and breadth of capability.

According to the UKHO, the planned initial duration of the ARDS managed service provider (MSP) contract is three years. The UKHO has the option to extend the agreement for two additional one-year periods.

The ARDS project sits within the UKHO’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT). The project is expected to develop, coordinate, and evaluate the delivery of the British government’s strategies pertaining to counter-terrorism and serious and organised crime.

ARDS’ other objectives include delivery of elements of strategies that fall to OSCT, and coordinating domestic CT crisis management.

Within OCST, the National Communications Data Service (NCDS) is responsible for the delivery and maintenance of communications data services that help security, intelligence, law enforcement agencies, and other requesting authorities (RA) to get communications data (CD) under the appropriate legal framework.

The NCDS is said to continuously pursue ways to deliver enhancement to its provision of communications data. One of the operational requirements is to boost the coverage of smaller telecoms operators.

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The contract notice from the UKHO reads: “NCDS intends to procure an MSP service to provide a collaborative, innovative and responsive environment in which ideas, solutions and services can be developed to the benefit of NCDS, TOs and its customers in the LEA community.

“NCDS needs new thinking, new approaches and new attitudes to create this environment, it will encourage potential bidders to approach ARDS with fresh ideas, creativity and openness.”

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