Today we're publishing the Cloud Challenge Book 2026 and we want the most ambitious, innovative technology partners in the UK and beyond to read it.
The Cloud Challenge Book has been designed by the Government Digital Service, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Government Commercial Agency, in partnership with the National Cyber Security Centre and the Government Cyber Unit. It is modelled on the success of the Ministry of Defence's British Army Challenge Set and Digital Targeting Web Challenge Book - an approach that has already demonstrated what can happen when government is clear about what it needs and invites industry to rise to the challenge.
Our aim is to excite ambitious current and future industry partners to invest and innovate with us as we build firm national-scale digital foundations on cloud, grow the British economy, and transform the public sector.
Why now, and why this matters
Cloud is a critical enabler of the services we all rely on each day. The UK cloud market was worth over £10.5 billion in 2024 and growing at 30% each year, driven by the rapid advance of AI. The UK is already the second nation globally to have a Cloud First policy, and approximately 60% of government digital services have already migrated to cloud. That is real progress, and we should be proud of it. But it has taken 13 years to get here, and around 28% of our estate is still legacy - including an increasing number of red-rated systems. The current status quo is not sustainable.
The blueprint for modern digital government, published in January 2025, set out a clear commitment to smarter, more coordinated digital foundations across the whole of the public sector. The roadmap for modern digital government takes that further. The Cloud Challenge Book is how we begin to deliver on those commitments at national scale. It asks the question: what would it take for the UK public sector to act as a single, coordinated customer and how could the industry help us achieve that?
How the Cloud Challenge Book supports the National Cloud Infrastructure Programme
The Cloud Challenge Book will support development of the National Cloud Infrastructure Programme (NCIP). The programme is seeking to explore how government can better coordinate cloud demand across the public sector and work with industry to support long-term digital capability, enable initiatives like the UK AI Hardware Plan, while moving towards more outcome-based procurement approaches. It will support a more strategic partnership with industry and aims to ensure that future investments in cloud infrastructure are focused on delivering tangible public sector and economic benefits.
The Cloud Challenge Book demonstrates the challenges we want to solve with industry that are only enabled when government is clear about what it needs and committed to acting at national scale, some of which will be addressed through NCIP.
Five challenges, national scale
The Cloud Challenge Book sets out five challenges. Each one represents an ambitious, national-scale opportunity where government is seeking innovative, scalable solutions developed in collaboration with industry.
The challenges in this book share a common thread. They are ambitious in scale - designed to transform a nation, not just improve a process. They are adaptive, bringing together requirements and customer groups that might not obviously belong together to create solutions with real staying power. They are urgent because the public deserves better, and the current approach is not sustainable. And they are enabling and empowering - built around open, flexible solutions that grow UK capability in supply chains, skills and cloud adoption, rather than locking us into any single path.
Challenge 1: Zero legacy public sector
Cloud has been a critical enabler for legacy remediation. Yet, a considerable number of government digital services still rely on inefficient legacy systems. Remediation funding has increased but is still insufficient for the size of the challenge. We need a fundamentally different approach - one that gives public sector organisations comprehensive, automated visibility of their assets, accelerates modernisation of complex systems, and ensures newly-created services do not add to the legacy challenge. As the blueprint puts it: we need to reset our relationship with technology risk.
Challenge 2: Public digital infrastructure for an AI era
UK-based organisations need to scale in an AI era, which requires an order of magnitude more compute, storage and networking. The UK has leading technology, AI and AI hardware companies - we want to enable those companies to scale their products rapidly to global usage. The Challenge Book explores what would be required for UK-based cloud infrastructure to compete with leading global regions, with at least two fully-featured regions available to those who need to stay within UK jurisdiction.
Challenge 3: Secure-by-default, resilient-by-default cloud
Cloud platforms are the foundations on which we build our most critical digital services and store our data. In 2024, the UK government designated data infrastructure - including physical data centres and cloud - as Critical National Infrastructure, placing it on a par with priority sectors such as energy, water, and transport.
As our ambition and dependence on technology grows, so must the security and resilience of our cloud platforms.
As the blueprint for modern digital government sets out: "Our infrastructure needs to be resilient and secure against threats if we're to build and maintain public trust and confidence. Currently, vital systems and services are too exposed to risk: we need to tackle these and embed security by design, at scale."
Transparency builds trust - and we want to work collaboratively with industry to co-create engineering approaches that reflect this principle, shaping cloud platform engineering and product decisions at scale.
Challenge 4: A cloud and AI expert nation
The Prime Minister has set an objective for 1 in 10 civil servants to be digital, data and cyber professionals by 2030. We need to grow cloud and AI skills across the whole spectrum - from young people not yet in education, employment or training (NEET), to national experts running critical global-scale services. Change won't happen without the right people, with the right expertise, working at the right levels.
Challenge 5: Commercial value at national scale
The UK public sector is one of the largest consumers of cloud services globally, but we do not consistently act like one. Fragmented demand and locally optimised procurements dilute our collective buying power, increase cost and risk, and slow the creation of better services. We need commercial models that enable faster delivery, reuse and shared investment across the public sector.
How to engage
Each challenge in the book is ambitious, adaptive, urgent, enabling and empowering. We are not looking for incremental improvements, we are looking to transform and enable a nation, and we are seeking proposals that can scale nationally.
Read the Cloud Challenge Book in full on GOV.UK.
If you have any questions or would like to contact the team, please email cloud-strategy@dsit.gov.uk.
We look forward to hearing from you.
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