News
UKCloud announces significant investment and recruitment to deliver the UK’s first High Assurance cloud platform
April 2018 by Marc Jacob
UKCloud announced that it has made significant progress in designing and building the first High Assurance cloud platform for the UK’s most critical and sensitive systems classified at SECRET. Launching in mid-2018, the new platform will be entirely UK-sovereign and will be branded UKCloudX. This significant investment supports the new ‘Fusion Doctrine’ by creating the ideal platform to enable Defence and National Security agencies to share insights and evolve our collective capabilities to address the intensifying and diversifying threats to our country and to our way of life.
In the recently published National Security Capability Review (NSCR), the Prime Minister unveiled the Fusion Doctrine, a new national security approach to orchestrating the capabilities of every part of government and its agencies to rise to the challenge of rapidly evolving national security threats. The NSCR aims to ensure that the UK’s investment in its national security capabilities "is as joined-up, effective and efficient as possible" in addressing changing security challenges, such as the recent terrorist incidents in London and Manchester and nerve agent attack in Salisbury.
UKCloud has been working with different parts of government, and industry specialists, for more than a year to design and build an innovative High Assurance cloud platform that will enable projects classified at SECRET to: collaborate more effectively to gain better insights; innovate more quickly to develop new capabilities; and to achieve improved value for money by reducing waste and inefficiency. The large investment by UKCloud has been driven by the exceptional level of interest and anticipation from government agencies and from industry providers such as Defence Contractors and Systems Integrators.
UKCloud’s High Assurance cloud platform will be entirely UK sovereign, hosted in accredited government-grade UK data centres provided by Ark (who are part of the joint venture with the UK Government’s Cabinet Office called Crown Hosting) and operated exclusively within the UK by security-cleared cloud experts being trained and recruited by UKCloud. The new cloud platform will be powered by proven infrastructure from Cisco Systems which is underpinning the significant investment that UKCloud is making to create this world-class capability.
UKCloud is finalising the deployment of the High Assurance cloud platform which will be the first to meet the stringent requirements of the SECRET classification level and will help bridge the apparent separation between the NSCR and the Modernising Defence Programme that was identified in a recent RUSI report. The High Assurance cloud platform is available through the Technology Services 2 procurement framework and UKCloud is on-boarding solution providers such as System Integrators and Independent Software Vendors to use this platform to enable new Cloud Software and Cloud Support capabilities at SECRET through the G-Cloud 10 procurement framework that is expected shortly. UKCloud is planning a formal launch of this new capability and will announce a community of technology and solution partners in the near future.
