Regulator and registered charity the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has signed a five-year, £5.2m contract for a managed and hosted core IT infrastructure from Business Systems Group (BSG).

Working across two data centres, BSG will take care of NMC’s servers and networks, disaster recovery, systems monitoring, technical design and ongoing consultation.

It will also provide support for the regulator’s database, operating system, Microsoft Exchange email provision, Citrix desktops and Cisco CallManager telephony.

All software will be hosted, including the NMC’s OpenAccounts financial management system, which is provided by BSG’s sister company Advanced Business Solutions.

NMC’s infrastructure had previously been managed by a four-person in-house team, who will now be TUPEd across to work for BSG.

Having won a six-month tendering process, BSG is required to ensure 99.9 per cent service availability.