I think I agree with you. I don't see how it's different than other big data companies vying for contracts. I'm sure Google and Microsoft would have also tried to get involved. Not to mention the scale of the amount of data this is and that most of them will be familiar with patient data retention and privacy laws, similar to HIPAA in the US.

The papers released under the OIA showed health's "technical debt" included 4000 competing or obsolete IT applications, and ageing clinical and non-clinical data systems.

Should give you and idea of the size of a job like this. Do we have any locally owned cloud/datacenter companies sizeable enough to manage this and provide the same kind of redundancy that AWS/Azure can give?