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The recently published Digital Strategy for Defence outlines the vision for the digital needs of UK Defence by 2030, including the delivery of a secure Digital Backbone. The strategy states, “Defence’s Digital Backbone will be an ecosystem – a combination of people, process, data and technology; it will enable friction-free access to our data, connecting sensors in one domain to platforms in other domains, via decision-makers at the relevant levels in real time”. To achieve the clear ambition set out in the Digital Strategy, the Defence sector will need to address the skills, budget and compliance challenges discovered in UKCloud’s recent State of Digital and Data survey.

Today, UKCloudX announces Defence Cloud, a broad suite of outcome-centric offerings that address the people, process and data aspects of the Digital Strategy – built on a sovereign High Assurance Cloud Platform, that is an essential digital backbone component keeping our nation safe. Defence Cloud enables powerful collaboration between agencies, specialist providers and digital innovators to help the UK maintain and enhance its information superiority as a digital exemplar. As a Strategic Cloud Provider to the UK government, UKCloudX also delivers demonstrable social value evidenced by its recent attainment of the Social Value Quality Mark and commitment to the Armed Forces Covenant.

UKCloudX’s Defence Cloud initiative is a full platform, service wrap and ecosystem of solutions designed to support every stage of the digital journey from Definition to Deployment in the following three ways.

• Differentiated Platform – UKCloudX is the only UK Sovereign flexible multi-cloud platform (which offers choice of cloud technology including VMware, Red Hat and Microsoft) capable of hosting workloads across higher classification levels, up to and including Tier 2. The platform is secure by design with security cleared staff and government grade data centres, and is independently certified Carbon Neutral Cloud Services as part of its commitment to sustainable technology. It is intrinsically secure with flexible deployments such as edge, on-premises and Crown Hosting, and is natively connected to secure networks including RLI and SLI. The platform is available now with referenceable customers across the UK defence sector.

• Service Wrapper – 77% agree that skills and resource levels are a major impediment to cloud adoption so UKCloudX’s Defence Cloud provides a compelling service wrap, encompassing both professional and managed services, which will help to address the skills and capability gap in the sector. UKCloudX has the skills and capabilities to deliver success and meet the accreditation requirements of defence. As a service designed for mission critical systems, UKCloudX provides award winning, world class 24x7 support free of charge – the first to do so in the sector.

• Rich Partner Ecosystem – UKCloudX has assembled a specialist defence partner ecosystem (including boutique SME’s through to the largest Defence primes) which accelerate innovation enabling the defence sector a shorter time to value through proven solutions rather than building them themselves. UKCloudX’s upcoming ‘Secure by Design’ Transformation Week showcases the best-in-class secure solutions for defence and explores a series of key strategic themes within Defence & National Security on how UKCloudX’s ecosystem of partners are addressing the challenges ahead.