"I think that what the government is trying to do is ease the procurement process and save costs for government departments looking for shared hosting by opening it up to a few more suppliers outside of the big Tier 1 outsourcers," said Brown.

"We will probably see a few more commercial players involved, such as Rackspace or BT, and possibly even some specialist SMEs."

The first iteration of the CloudStore was and saw 257 suppliers, half of which were SMEs, signed up to provide public cloud services to the government departments.