The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the nursing and midwifery regulator for over 660,000 registered nurses and midwives in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Islands, has signed a five year contract worth up to £5.2m with Business Systems Group (BSG).

Under the agreement, BSG will be managing and hosting NMC’s core IT infrastructure across two different data centres.

This will include the managing and hosting of NMC’s servers and networks, disaster recovery, systems monitoring, technical design and ongoing consultation.

BSG will also be providing database and operating system support and managing NMC’s Microsoft Exchange email, Citrix desktops and telephony (using Cisco CallManager).

The contract requires BSG to ensure 99.9% service availability and timely incident management. All software applications will be hosted by BSG, including NMC’s OpenAccounts financial management system provided by BSG’s sister company, COA Solutions.

BSG will also be providing the NMC test and development environments, including release management, as new applications come online.

NMC’s IT infrastructure and systems are currently managed in-house by a four person IT team, they will be TUPEd across to work for BSG.