Government Digital Service to live in 'multi-tenanted' cloud from SCC

Reseller-cum-integrator SCC has bagged a G-Cloud contract to provide hosting and IT services to the Government Digital Service (GDS).

This deal comes less than two months after the Midlands-based firm was the first to be given clearance to punt its nine cloudy services, under the OptimizeCloud banner, to all gov departments.

Under that certification, SCC was awarded an Impact Level 2 and 3 security rating by Cabinet Office inspectors. Certified services included virtual machines, back up, email and secure storage.

On the back of that, the RM1557 agreement is the first contract win signed by the channel giant, meaning it will provide a platform for a number of current and future digital public services.

"G-Cloud is a concerted effort to enable the kind of technology initiatives that will help the government deliver a new breed of services," said SCC public sector director Tracey Westall in a canned statement.

SCC said its Secure Multi-Tenanted Cloud (SMTC) service are the result of two years worth of development work and a seven figure investment, and represents efforts to boost annuity revenues.

The contract win comes a year after the GDS took the covers off its first project, E-Petitions which SCC claims was hosted on its IL2 platform, that has seen 13 million unique visitors offer up 36,000 petitions at a cost to government of less than 1 pence per use.

The GDS team was set up within the Cabinet Office to figure out ways to transform the provision of digital services in the public sector.

The unit was born out of one-time online travel agent Martha Lane Fox's report entitled 'Directgov 2010 and beyond: evolution not revolution'.

Last month, Skyscape inked an Infrastructure-as-a-Service deal with GDS as primary contractor for hosting gov.uk, the new government website currently in beta testing. ®