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These expanded capabilities address a key finding in UKCloud’s State of Cloud Adoption survey, that organisations lack key skills which are needed to build (78.3%) and manage (77.31%) applications in the cloud. Other research indicates that many organisations are increasingly, “trying to manage complex applications with a combination of siloed tools” in an attempt to retain control of IT environments which are increasingly spanning on-premises and multiple cloud locations. As highlighted by Gartner, teams are already stretched managing existing IT, and the associated management, patching and other IT operations or “housekeeping” activities which have become increasingly complex and unsustainable.

Despite this, public sector organisations continue to be disrupted by digital transformation initiatives which are needed to meet the higher expectations of internal and external customers as well as the need to drive more efficiency. Hence, IT functions face the prospect of continued demand for digital technologies which will further increase the complexity of IT operations and the risk/impact of ungoverned shadow IT and IT outages.

The result of this cost and complexity, is that organisations risk inhibiting their digital transformation. In response to this, UKCloud has released an expanded portfolio of managed services consisting of:

1. Managed Monitoring as a Service
Organisations are increasingly placing traditional workloads in the cloud. UKCloud was engaged by a government agency because it was struggling to deliver service assurance for a workload that it had moved onto a global cloud platform. UKCloud’s Managed Monitoring as a Service enabled this agency to rapidly implement a cost-effective 24/7 monitoring solution that leveraged AIOps to reduce alert noise and enhance the productivity of the specialist analysts.

2. Managed VM Recovery Point
Today more than ever, businesses are dependent on digital services to operate flexibly and serve their employees, customers and citizens. Organisations require the continuity and consistency of these services, as the impact of downtime is significant from both a reputational and financial perspective. UKCloud will ensure Virtual Machines (VM) are protected on a nightly basis, in the event of disaster the entire VM or individual files can be restored from a Recovery Point within the previous 24 hours.

3. Patching as a Service
As the usage of digital services increase, Cyber Threat Actors continue to take advantage of vulnerable systems as witnessed in the case of the Wannacry attack. In this example the organisation had failed to keep up to date with patches, fearing a break in service. The Patching as a Service from UKCloud will ensure routine OS patch management for compute instances deployed across UKCloud’s multi-cloud platform. Typically, organisations spend circa 18,000 hours on this activity annually, amounting to an eye watering cost of £1 million.

4. Anti-Virus as a Service
Alleviates the usual management challenges around the deployment, management, and operation of antivirus solutions. UKCloud will protect environments from the dangers of viruses and malware, saving organisations up to 40 days of resource typically spent investigating non-incidents.

5. Runbook Automation
Whilst organisations look to gain more visibility, the speed of which these issues are resolved becomes key which is where runbook automation can help deliver significant benefits. UKCloud will execute a predefined set of actions in response to well understood events to achieve a specific outcome, helping to accelerate time to resolution for known issues.

As highlighted in the recent Strategic Cloud Provider to government announcement, 83% of public sector organisations lack the required skills and resource so need support with their cloud adoption, from ideation through to delivery and subsequent deployment. With almost a decade of experience working with, and managing, cloud-based technologies, UKCloud extends its knowledge and capabilities out to its customers and partners supporting them with their digital transformation at every stage of their programme. The UKCloud customer services team consistently delivers industry leading customer satisfaction (as measured by a Net Promoter Score (NPS) score of +55), and so public sector organisations have a team of local, security cleared specialists that they can depend on to support their digitalisation.