Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has stated that the £4.93m G-Cloud framework stands to save the public sector a substantial £340m. The saving estimation came in a written response from Maude to an enquiry about the costs from Michael Dugher, MP for Barnsley East.

CloudStore, a catalogue of public cloud services for the public sector’s use, was launched in February of this year. The catalogue comprises of 257 suppliers, 50% of which are SMEs – in keeping with the government’s pledge to move away from the major vendors and enter into more contracts with SMEs.

However, newly appointed director of the G-Cloud, Denise McDonagh said that the second iteration of the contract will also include some bigger names such as Amazon and Salesforce.