Public Procurement of Cloud Services – Plannable, Examination-Proof, Sovereign
As an authority or public IT service provider, if you want to procure cloud services, you must put them out to tender – in a product-neutral, transparent, and comparable manner. Whether a US hyperscaler or a sovereign European cloud like IONOS Cloud ultimately receives the contract award is not decided by the offer, but by the service description and evaluation criteria.
As an independent IT planning office, we prepare cloud procurements professionally and economically. We do not distribute products and do not receive commissions – we use our partnership with IONOS to access technical information, prices, and reference architectures.
What We Offer
1. Needs Assessment and Market Analysis
Recording the current landscape and workloads, clarifying protection requirements and data classes, structured market analysis with sovereign European and international cloud providers.
2. Service Description
Functional, product-neutral description of compute, storage, network, managed services, and operating services. Sovereignty requirements are formulated as verifiable criteria: data storage and operation in the EU or EEA, providers with headquarters and legal jurisdiction in Europe without access from third countries, BSI C5 certification, C3A criteria catalog, exit and portability capability.
3. Technical Annexes according to EVB-IT Cloud
EVB-IT Cloud is the contract type agreed upon by the federal government and Bitkom for the procurement of cloud services by the public sector. We create the technical annexes: service description, service level agreement (availability, response and recovery times, measurement procedures), technical-organizational measures, requirements for data migration, exit, and data deletion. The contract law examination is carried out by your procurement office or your legal department.
4. Evaluation Matrix and Economic Efficiency
Evaluation matrix according to the UfAB system, weighting of price and performance, price sheet with realistic quantity structures over the contract period – including data transfer, support levels, and exit costs. Optionally with economic efficiency consideration according to WiBe.
5. Offer Evaluation and Award Proposal
Professional evaluation of offers against the service description, clarification questions, evaluation according to the matrix, documented award proposal.
6. Migration and Operations Planning
Migration sequence, target architecture on IONOS Cloud (Data Center Designer, Managed Kubernetes, S3 Object Storage, Network), operations organization, and handover.
Why IONOS Cloud Plays a Role in Procurements
Data centers in several European countries, a European provider under European law, C5 certification, and a transparent pricing model meet the sovereignty criteria that administrations in Germany and Europe are increasingly demanding – without being tied to locations or legal systems outside the EU. For such an offer to be successful in the evaluation, these criteria must be accurately and non-discriminatorily reflected in the tender – which is exactly our planning task.
Procedure
Kick-off and delimitation, needs and market analysis, creation of tender documents in agreement with your procurement office, accompaniment of the procedure until the contract award. Typical duration: three to six months, depending on the procedure type.
For Whom
Federal, state, and local administration, municipal and public IT service providers, universities, social insurance agencies, KRITIS operators, as well as companies with procurement regulations – in Germany and the European procurement area.