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Procurement of firewall specialist time to
support the re-deployment 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
provide. We therefore need to deploy a replacement firewall to
alternative storage.
Given the criticality of such firewalls, we believe it is
appropriate to use a firewall specialist to support this deployment
to ensure we minimise the impact to operational services.

Alternative options considered

The Council has a current firewall support
partner. They have access and knowledge of the Council’s
existing firewall and network setup which will be essential for
this work. Given the cost is below £3000, and is at a
day-rate similar to another provider that the Council has looked
into, 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.