American and Brits differ on many things – the size of our cars, the length of our vacations, coffee vs. tea, which side of the road to drive on, the pronunciation of “aluminum.” But there is one area in where we have strong agreement: our governments must spend taxpayer dollars wisely.
As both governments search for new ways to become more efficient, it should come as no surprise that they are zeroing in on the use of technology. In the UK, government has put its money where its mouth is by introducing a Cloud First policy backed up by the UK Government G-Cloud framework aimed at easing purchasing by public-sector agencies across departments of the United Kingdom Government, commoditising information technology services through cloud computing.
In another example of American-British cooperation, the UK primarily uses the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of the cloud, with one of the cloud’s primary characteristics being an on-demand, self-service model.
Responding to this important initiative, Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) launched its own sovereign managed cloud platform consulting and services for the UK public sector in conjunction with Amazon Web Services (AWS). With five years’ experience in cloud hosting services for G-Cloud, combined with its AWS Managed Services certification, storage competency and managed recovery capability, this new service is unrivaled.
Sungard AS’ Managed Cloud – AWS, UK Sovereign service is designed to allow the public sector to run Sensitive workloads on AWS, managed by a highly-skilled and security-cleared DevOps team provided by Sungard AS. This new solution was designed to provide the public sector with the ability to fully benefit from the cost savings, risk management, and agility cloud computing has provided the commercial sector for more than a decade.
With these new Sungard AS services, a broad range of the public sector can take new workloads and applications on to a public cloud platform, all of which will be wholly sovereign and operated by experts that have been security cleared in the UK. To answer the growing sensitivities following GDPR, this will ensure that public sector workloads can enjoy the innovation of AWS and the resilience expertise of Sungard AS.
Sungard AS’s Managed Cloud – AWS, UK Sovereign service will provide:
- a Managed Cloud - AWS service for workloads and data classified as ‘Sensitive’ and ‘Official Sensitive’
- the agility that the AWS platform provides, whilst being confident that sensitive data is protected without having to build an AWS practice in house
- experience hosting Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) for services that are essential to maintain the security and wellbeing of the United Kingdom
- SC+ cleared consulting services with a proven track record of providing sovereign services to both Central and Local government, including cloud, hosting and recovery for efficient adoption
- SC+ cleared highly skilled DevOps team, providing 24x7 management of public sector AWS infrastructure
- cost cuts by replacing legacy IT infrastructure
All of this is possible because of Sungard AS’ considerable expertise working with AWS, having achieved Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner status after meeting the criteria of a rigorous independent audit. Sungard AS is also a member of the AWS Solution Space Partner program based on their attainment of the AWS Storage Competency, featuring AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners that offer customer-ready solutions based on architectures validated by AWS. The close working relationship the two companies share demonstrate the value of staying tightly connected to achieve resilience.
As more and more government entities seek to curb costs and embrace the latest cloud technology, the timing couldn’t be more perfect for the collaboration of Sungard AS and AWS to bring these new on-demand cloud services to market – both in the U.S. and the UK. For more information, check out Sungard AS’ managed cloud and recovery services on AWS.
