Member Article

Cabinet Office Renews Emergency Response Contract with UKFast

Following an open tender competition through the Digital Marketplace, the Cabinet Office has signed a renewed contract with UKFast’s public sector department for the delivery of a private cloud platform for ResilienceDirect, which supports effective response to incidents like natural disasters, terror attacks and power outages.

The secure platform delivers a suite of capabilities to prepare, exercise, respond and recover, supporting a co-ordinated and efficient response linking the national tier Government Departments COBR and the local emergency services working collaboratively with local councils, utility providers and many other sectors.

The British hosting firm won the initial two-year contact in 2016 and the extension gives the Cabinet Office access to UKFast’s industry leading government hosting services and round-the-clock support for another year, with the option of a further year’s extension.

Luana Avagliano, head of ResilienceDirect, said: “UKFast won the contract by being open, honest and proactive. The team are excellent at exploring how to maximise private cloud to make sure we are getting value for money.

“UKFast is a truly innovative company and delivers solutions to the challenges we face. Disaster recovery, for example, is expensive but we need to have that capability to allow failover. UKFast not only provide gold standard disaster recovery but our dedicated team are constantly rechecking infrastructure, security and assurances.

“We have to be as secure as anyone can possibly be – UKFast are the best in their league and really help to keep the UK safe.”

More than 36,000 users are currently registered on the platform, spread across more than 3,500 organisations. ResilienceDirect needed a solution to provide the scalability to cope with a huge spike in users logging onto the platform and sharing vast amounts of data during an emergency situation.

Steve Jewell, head of UKFast Public Sector, said: “It’s a huge honour to be given this renewed responsibility and to continue to support the government on such a critical project. It’s testament to the huge investment we’ve put into UKFast’s public sector capability in recent years.”

“We have developed a fantastic partnership with the ResilienceDirect team and know their systems well. By working closely with the whole network of co-suppliers we are able to support the whole resilience community.”

UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones said: “The government is doing incredible work to bring in more sophisticated systems in the face of modern-day terrorism and an ever-evolving list of threats. Using a cutting-edge cloud platform is the natural way to do that.

“We’re ensuring the government knows there is a British cloud option aligned to the needs of the people of this country. Government needs to know where its data is and values having people at the end of a telephone day and night to support them when they need it most.”

UKFast is a government approved supplier through the G-Cloud 10 framework and delivers services to the MoD, NHS, emergency services, education and both local and central government.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tim Parker .