Objectives

The primary objective of this tender is to procure private cloud hosting services for the Eastern Cape Liquor Board's ICT applications and infrastructure. The goal is to establish a scalable, secure, resilient, and fully managed cloud environment that ensures high availability, business continuity, data protection, and compliance with relevant ICT standards. This initiative aims to modernize the existing infrastructure, reduce long-term costs, and enhance operational efficiency.

Scope

The scope of work includes:

• Transitioning from the current private cloud infrastructure to a new private hosted environment, including data and application migration.
• Implementing, operating, and maintaining an integrated, scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-based ICT server infrastructure (IaaS) hosted in South Africa.
• Providing Backup as a Service (BaaS), cloud security, clusters, and dedicated firewalls.
• Building, deploying, and managing offsite cloud server infrastructure, including patch management, performance monitoring, and availability management.
• Configuring network connectivity, including secure point-to-point links and VPNs from ECLB offices to the cloud environment.
• Ensuring security mechanisms such as firewalls, threat detection, data loss prevention, and access controls.
• Providing support services, including incident management, monitoring, and reporting aligned with governance frameworks.
• Ensuring full ownership, control, and sovereignty of data within South Africa, with secure data disposal at contract end.
• Supporting additional virtual servers and operating systems as required, including future scalability.

Technical Requirements

The technical specifications include:

• Migration of existing servers, including disaster recovery setup with primary and secondary data centers, RPO of 6 hours, RTO of 4 hours, and backup retention of 90 days.
• Provision of cloud infrastructure with high availability, security, and compliance with standards such as ISO 27001 Tier II.
• Implementation of network security, including firewalls, VPNs, intrusion detection/prevention, and real-time threat management.
• Management of operating systems (Windows Server 2019, Linux variants), database licenses (SQL Server, MySQL), and backup/recovery software.
• Monitoring tools for performance, capacity, security, and resource utilization, with dashboards and reporting capabilities.
• Support for antivirus/endpoint security, patch management, and vulnerability assessments.
• Provision of detailed change management, incident escalation, and support processes.
• Compliance with ICT governance frameworks such as COBIT 2019 and POPIA.
• Provision of a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) covering response times, performance guarantees, and penalties.

Skills Requirements

The successful bidder must demonstrate:

• Proven experience in cloud hosting, infrastructure migration, and management within South Africa.
• Capability to design and implement secure, scalable, and resilient cloud environments, including disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Qualified personnel such as Cloud Systems Engineers (Azure or equivalent), support engineers (NQF Level 6 or higher), and ITIL or COBIT certified account managers.
• Ability to provide monitoring, reporting, and security management tools, with dashboards and analytics.
• Track record with reference letters confirming similar projects completed within the last 5 years.
• Knowledge of local data sovereignty requirements and compliance with POPIA and other relevant legislation.
• Capacity to support future scalability, operating system diversity, and additional virtual server provisioning.
• Strong project management, change management, and support skills to ensure seamless migration and ongoing service delivery.