London - 2nd July 2019 - UKCloud, the multi-cloud experts dedicated to making transformation happen across UK public sector, has today announced that it has been successful in expanding its G-Cloud portfolio with pioneering new services and solutions that address the resource challenges that are inhibiting accelerated adoption of cloud.
“We’re delighted that our innovative new capabilities have been accepted on G-Cloud 11. Cloud adoption is accelerating in most industries around the world. Yet, organisations in the UK public sector are generally constrained by the complexity of their legacy environments and the lack of appropriately skilled and experienced resources at their disposal. That’s why we have leveraged our recent investment from Digital Alpha to make available a range of new services and solutions on the Digital Marketplace that specifically address the challenges our public sector organisations are facing.” said UKCloud CEO, Simon Hansford.
UKCloud has long supported G-Cloud and uses each iteration to introduce new and improved services in response to the changing needs of the UK public sector. For G-Cloud 11, UKCloud has gone further than ever before by also introducing entirely new categories of capability by collaborating with specialist partners to deliver solutions and value-added services that are designed to help accelerate and de-risk an organisation’s journey to cloud.
UKCloud’s G-Cloud 11 portfolio is grouped into three categories:
Expert Support – UKCloud now provide support for all stages of a customer’s journey, from advisory services to 24/7 support and service optimisation. For organisations embarking on their initial steps to the cloud, UKCloud has introduced a range of Professional Services providing expert advice and guidance – not just for UKCloud services – but across the multi-cloud spectrum including on-premises Private Clouds and SaaS options. UKCloud now provide specialist assessments such as CyberScore and Cost Optimisation Services (based on VMware CloudHealth), resulting in actionable plans that can either be executed by the customer or by UKCloud and their large ecosystem of solution providers which include boutique consultants and global system integrators. UKCloud also introduced new in-life support services to ensure customers can continue to make it easier to run and manage their cloud estates including new Managed Monitoring Services to provide 24/7 monitoring of applications, proactive patching and configuration management of workloads.
Solutions & Services – Many organisations want more than just commodity cloud components such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service. UKCloud has expanded its 3rd party software to include outcome based solutions like an application monitoring and optimisation services (partnering with Cisco AppDynamics) and end to end universal encryption solutions (partnering with Hytrust), as well as value added services such as CloudSOC (partnering with e2e) that provides 24/7 protective monitoring of customers’ core assets to keep them protected against cyber-attacks.
Multi-Cloud Platform – For customers who want to embrace the diversity of multiple clouds, UKCloud understands that no single cloud suits all requirements and so is providing new cloud options; from UKCloud’s own Public Cloud, to deploying Private Cloud (in a customer’s data centre or UKCloud’s own), to High Assurance cloud (for especially secure and sensitive systems), to bespoke hardware requirements like Oracle SPARC capability and now also to hyperscale cloud with Microsoft Azure.
UKCloud has continued to develop their multi-cloud platform which provides a “One Portal, One Service Desk, One Network, One Invoice and One Governance” wrapper. In this way, UKCloud make it easy for organisations to manage their multiple cloud and on-premises environments by providing standardised tooling that will work across all UKCloud platforms as well as the organisations existing IT and systems on 3rd party platforms.
Partnering for success
In addition to providing expertise, solutions & services and platforms that are optimised for UK Public Sector organisations, UKCloud continues to grow its support for a vibrant & thriving partner ecosystem, which ranges from UK SMEs through to the best global system integrators. All these partners take the power of UKCloud offerings and deliver compelling enhanced solutions for the benefit of UK Public Sector. Over every iteration of G-Cloud, UKCloud has grown the base of UKCloud-powered partner solutions and expects to see a further 16% growth in the number of solutions versus G-Cloud 10.
“G-Cloud remains a very important channel to market for us and we are delighted to once again partner with UKCloud on our submission. This ensures our market within UK Public Sector can efficiently and reliably procure our solutions and services in the law enforcement arena and beyond. As always, the UKCloud team were there to help and guide us on the adoption of their platforms together with the actual process to submit to G-Cloud’’ said Dave Blackburn, Technical Director at Geoff Smith Associates.
Nick Mayhew, Director of Partners at UKCloud added, “We are proud to see UKCloud’s platforms and services powering so many innovative G-Cloud partner solutions that are truly enabling and accelerating digital transformation in UK Public Sector. I was delighted with the level of engagement from all our partners through the submission process, and especially with respect to our new capabilities, which support them in creating even more value for the public sector community.”
The combination of a range of multi-cloud solutions and services designed specifically for the UK Public Sector, together with exceptional compliance, service performance and support credentials, confirm UKCloud’s unique position in accelerating the ongoing digital transformation across the Public Sector which ultimately benefits UK citizens and businesses.