HMRC Switch To AWS Takes Down A Small UK Cloud Business

Oh! A small UK cloud provider, DataCentred, has gone under, after HMRC, its largest customer pulled the plug on a services contract following the government decision to make the switch to AWS.

HM Revenue and Customs had previously signed an agreement with this company based in Manchester two years ago via the G-Cloud framework — a contract that underpinned 85% of the annual revenue for DataCentred.

However, it was some six months back that the cloud provider was informed that the tax collector would no longer be using its services, as it had revamped its policies, and made the switch to Amazon Web Services.

According to the details provided, this company is one of at least three that have lost business with HMRC following the policy shift. But it is the first direct causality of this change.

Which, some would say, was coming all along.

The fact is that most people in the country file their tax returns in the last week of January, and the tax department primarily had need to scale up their infrastructure for a month during this peak. Keeping extra servers on standby for eleven months certainly seems superfluous here.

Nevertheless, this will only increase the heat on AWS a little in the UK, as there have already been calls for the government to boycott Amazon due to tax issues.

We can now add supplier lock-in to this debate, too.