UKCloud, also trading as UKCloud Health and UKCloudX, is a British cloud provider, headquartered in Farnborough, United Kingdom. It provides specialist multicloud services to organisations in the UK public sector and regulated industries. The company was founded in 2011 as Skyscape Cloud Services, rebranding as UKCloud in August 2016. UKCloud, together with its UKCloud Health and UKCloudX divisions, supports hundreds of digital workloads for organisations such as , Ministry of Justice, and amongst others.
History and background
The company was established in 2011, by co-founders Jeff Thomas, Jeremy Sanders, Phil Dawson and Simon Hansford, as Skyscape Cloud Services, but changed the name to UKCloud Ltd five years later following a legal wrangle with Sky. In 2017, to specialise in supporting HealthTech across the UK health and care sector. The UKCloud Health platform is used by HealthTech solution providers such as Babylon Health, IMMJ Systems and Capgemini. UKCloudX was announced in 2018 to focus on the provision of secure cloud services to the UK Defence and National Security sector. UKCloudX claimed to offer the first public cloud for high classification systems in the UK. In 2019, Cisco backed Digital Alpha Advisors announced an investment in UKCloud to accelerate the growth of the company. UKCloud focuses on changing how the UK government purchases and uses IT services, detailed in the March 2011UK Government ICT Strategy. The company has since sold to government through the G-Cloud frameworks Digital Marketplace and has been doing so since the first iteration of the framework in 2012. They offer a multicloud platform consisting of VMWare, Oracle, Openstack, and Microsoft Azure UKCloud are subject to regular audits, assessments and inspections by certification bodies, regulators and accreditors. The firm has recently achieved ISO27017 & ISO27018, and is also certified to ISO9001, ISO20000 and ISO27001. UKCloud are a carbon neutral company who offers its customers Carbon Neutral Hosting, achieved through an independent assessment of the CO2 emissions produced from direct and indirect sources required to deliver, followed by an offset-inclusive emissions reduction programme. UKCloud are also a completely sovereign cloud provider meaning all applications and data are hosted in UK datacentres & the company is incorporated as a British company under UK legal jurisdiction.
Awards
In 2016, UKCloud won the Communications Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Award. It has also won the Cloudex 20:20 Award and a UK IT Industry Award in 2013. and are winners of The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 2016. UKCloud were winners for the Tech Track 100, ranking number 1 in the league table in 2016. In 2017, UKCloud were announced as recipients of the prestigious The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in Innovation. In 2018, UKCloud won the award for G-Cloud Public Sector Provider of the year for the second year consecutively, the company also featured as one of the Future Fifty’s fastest growing technology companies. In 2019, UKCloud announced it had been recognised by the Best Companies scheme with a one-star accreditation. UKCloud also won the Service Excellence award at Inspire'19.
Partnerships
The original public cloud platform was delivered in partnership with QinetiQ, VMware, Cisco, Dell EMC and Ark Data Centres. UKCloud has since moved to a multicloud platform, offering cloud environments from a choice of technology partners including Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle and VMware. UKCloud partners with Ark Data Centres to host its public cloud platforms within the UK government's which is also used by Crown Hosting Data Centres. UKCloud now delivers multicloud services across hyperscale clouds, 3rd party data centres and on-premises environments.
