The UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) has extended its contract with Kyndryl for another year.

In an agreement valued at £2.28 million ($2.83m), Kyndryl will help Defra to further reduce its technical debt as part of its cloud adoption project.

Defra and Kyndryl began working together since April 2023, when they signed their first direct contract.

"This renewed partnership with Defra is an exciting step forward as we continue to support them in managing their core network infrastructure all while ensuring the delivery of critical services that millions of UK citizens rely on daily," said John Chambers, president of Kyndryl United Kingdom and Ireland.

"Defra's ambitious roadmap for a cleaner, greener, and more prosperous country aligns perfectly with Kyndryl's commitment to empowering the UK's public sector to deliver better services and enhance people's lives."

Defra, like many other government departments, has a significant amount of legacy and outdated technology. Kyndryl has been assisting Defra with modernizing IT systems, managing networks, and supporting core network infrastructure to host and run Defra’s critical services.

In December 2022, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report looking at Defra's IT setup, noting that many of its services were based on "aging IT systems and Infrastructure," adding that "across the whole of government, aging IT systems are a key source of inefficiency and create a major constraint to improving and modernizing government services."

That report estimated that Defra would need 10 years for a full transformation of its business applications.

Defra is a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), having signed a three-year £20.8 million (~$25m) agreement with the cloud company in January 2023.

That contract saw the department commit to spending at least $4.7m per year but expects the actual amount to total ~$25m, and is a six-times increase on the 2021 deal Defra signed with AWS, which would have been due to expire at the end of 2023.

May 2024 saw a Defra data center suffer a four-day power outage.

In August of last year, Defra put out a Prior Information Notice stating that it was seeking hosting and storage services that would include the provisioning and management of data centers based on-premise and private cloud infrastructure.