Archive services

Tender description

The Welsh Government requires an archiving and hosting service for their web estate. The websites produced by the Welsh Government contains public records and must be managed in accordance with information management legislation and best practice criteria. Capturing, managing, retrieving and preserving the Welsh Government’s web estate plays an important role in helping the Welsh Government meet its obligations under the public records Act. It is therefore necessary that the Welsh Government’s websites, and its social media, is archived to a high standard in order that it is preserved for future generations. Archiving websites and social media gives organisations the chance to provide access to legacy information that they may not necessarily want to keep on their “live” website. Web archives should be harvested in their original form and be capable of being delivered as they were on the live web, providing a record of web content as it was available at a specific date and time. When a website is archived, the context of the information it provides is maintained, meaning that users can view the information in the context in which it was originally presented. The creation and maintenance of web records form parts of the Welsh Government’s record keeping processes and support good business practice. As web information often changes quickly, there are risks posed by failing to capture changes made to web records. We currently have 30 Tb of archived Welsh Government websites from the exercises undertaken in 2014, 2015 and 2016. We need to arrange ongoing hosting of this data so that these archived versions of our websites remain accessible to the Welsh Government. Hosting will also be required for future exercises undertaken as part of this contract.