News
Skyscape Streamlines Defence Research Project Contracting For The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
March 2016 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
Skyscape Cloud Services Limited announced that it has delivered Compute-as-a-Service solutions to the
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), an executive agency sponsored by
the Ministry of Defence (MOD), for the support of Research Cloud (R-Cloud), an
online marketplace for suppliers to tender research project contracts.
Dstl aims to meet suppliers’ expectations and accelerate contracting for science
and technology research projects, replacing a tendering process that was previously based on spreadsheets and emails with an online marketplace dubbed Research Cloud, or R-Cloud.
One of Dstl’s requirements for R-Cloud was an external cloud-based hosting
environment with infrastructure based in the UK, for data protection and security
reasons. Skyscape’s cloud services were chosen through the G-Cloud framework with the commercial data hosted on Skyscape’s Assured OFFICIAL platform.
Now, unless a project is especially large or requires additional scrutiny, Dstl aims
to go from a statement of requirements to a contract within 35 calendar days — a
much shorter timeframe than was previously possible.
"Hosting the entire R-Cloud application on Skyscape’s UK sovereign and resilient,
Assured OFFICIAL cloud platform, allowed us to maintain the required level of
security assurance, while simplifying the design and reducing the number of virtual
machines,” said Dr Neil Higson, Project Manager at Dstl. “Our platform is
delivering the efficiency and cost benefits to our contracting process that we’d
hoped for, plus it’s more streamlined for everyone to use.”
