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Procurement of firewall specialist time to
support the migration of one of the Council’s firewalls to
alternative cloud storage.

Reasons for the decision

Firewalls protect the Council’s network
and associated data. The Council currently operates a mixture of
hardware and software firewalls. Our cloud firewall is currently
using a storage solution that the cloud provider is ceasing to
offer. We therefore need to migrate the firewall to alternative
storage.

Given the criticality of such firewalls, we believe it is
appropriate to use a firewall specialist to support this migration,
to ensure we minimise the impact to operational services in this
migration.

Alternative options considered

The Council has a current firewall support
partner. They have access and knowledge of the Council’s
current firewall and network setup which will be essential for this
work. Given the cost is below £700, it was not considered
value-for-money to engage an alternative supplier that would need
supplier and Council time for knowledge transfer, as well as
Council time to setup appropriate access capability.