The public sector opportunity for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), such as Outsourcery, is significant as the government transitions to cloud-based services. Outsourcery is already a recognised supplier to the Government Procurement Service, an executive agency of the Cabinet Office, through the G-Cloud Framework, alongside a number of its reseller partners, which provides access to 30,000 public sector organisations. Outsourcery is already ISO 27001 (Information Security) accredited and is capable of deploying ‘IL2’ accredited solutions, which are typically suitable for local government.
However, UK central government departments can require solutions that are accredited to the more stringent ‘IL3’ security level, which requires additional security and it to be hosted within UK borders. The UK government has introduced a Public Cloud First Policy mandate, which means that departments are now mandated to consider public cloud first in any IT procurement. It also wishes to see more flexible contracts and the involvement of UK SMEs in the delivery of services.
The government’s annual hosting cost is estimated to be worth £2bn and the opportunity for new IL3 based services to address that market and deliver savings is substantial. In order to complement its Public Cloud services Microsoft is working with Outsourcery to support the introduction of an IL3 accredited platform based on next generation technology and hosted in the UK. This will be wholly-owned and managed by Outsourcery.
Unique to the UK market, the platform, a physically separated version of Outsourcery’s existing ‘O-Cloud’ platform, will provide infrastructure-as-a-service, applications including Exchange Server, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM and Lync Server based unified communications with full voice capability. The second phase of the offering will also include data storage, archiving, backup, followed by services for Big Data analytics. As the leading UK CSP, Outsourcery is particularly well-placed to provide the UK government with a complete set of cloud-based offerings.
Piers Linney, Outsourcery’s Co-CEO, said “The deployment of an IL3 compliant version of our O-Cloud platform, powered by Microsoft, is a very significant development for Outsourcery and we expect it to represent a material revenue stream by the end of 2015, in addition to our existing commercial sector business. We will provide the UK government (as well as security sensitive commercial sector organisations) the broadest offering of IL3 compliant and fully integrated cloud-based services available in the UK that will span platform, applications, unified communications and Big Data storage and analytics.
“As well as the involvement of Microsoft, our large partners have been asking for such a capability as the government increasingly embraces cloud-based solutions for its ICT requirements.”