Member Article

Public Sector Cloud Confidence Increases

The fast-growing public sector arm of British cloud hosting firm UKFast Group Ltd is set to deliver 100% growth for a second consecutive year and has ambitions to make up 10% of the firm’s overall revenue by 2020.

The public sector department accounts for a steadily increasing percentage of the firm’s overall revenue, with a growing client portfolio including the Cabinet Office, MoD, major police and healthcare software providers and NHS Trusts.

Police services are a major growth area, with UKFast’s UK-based, compliant eCloud hosting solutions replacing the requirement to manage hardware and software updates on premise for each of the 43 individual forces.

The move to cloud offers significant cost savings to both law enforcement agencies and the software providers delivering solutions in support of them.

Last week UKFast announced a deal to deliver a cloud-based software as a service platform for Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary, helping the forces to deploy resources more safely and efficiently. UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones MBE said: “It’s a huge honour to support these critical organisations and provide value for the taxpayer.

“The public sector is under constant pressure to deliver services more efficiently and effectively, with ever-shrinking budgets. In most walks of life this is an impossibility, but with the application of the right technology it’s possible.

“More and more organisations are moving towards working in this way. It makes financial sense whilst easing the operational burden.”

Head of UKFast Public Sector Steve Jewell said: “We’ve invested significantly in the last year to build dedicated and compliant environments for the different sectors, including the police network and the new Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

“We’re now delivering services via eCloud to most of the UK police force in one guise or another. Working with software suppliers to bring cloud-delivered services to end users is ultimately more efficient and saves the taxpayer money.

“HCSN is another major growth area. We’ve got client solutions running on our HSCN-connected cloud already, but organisations are only just getting to grips with the new network and what it can do, so we expect activity to really ramp up through HSCN in the next 18 months.”

UKFast Public Sector was brought under the core UKFast Group Ltd umbrella in January.

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