Six Degrees has been providing the UK government with cloud services for a number of years, with the company deeply embedded into numerous government departments. Now, the company’s cloud services are being made available to the public sector in Scotland as part of the Scottish Government Cloud Services Framework. 

By joining the Scottish Government Cloud Services Framework, Six Degrees’ offering is available to all public sector organisations within Scotland. These organisations join existing government departments that already have access, including the Government Digital Service, Ministry of Justice, Crown Prosecution Service, Cabinet Office, Home Office, Local Authorities and blue light organisations. 

To launch its cloud services in Scotland, Six Degrees had to jump through quite a number of hoops to meet regulatory and sovereignty requirements, despite the country being within the UK. This included setting up data centre partnerships with Scottish providers, which kept the cloud’s production and backup workloads in Scotland. 

Thomas Konopka, industry director – Public Sector, Six Degrees, said, “The ways in which public sector organisations deliver services to citizens are constantly developing. At Six Degrees we see first-hand how transformational cloud technology enables digital engagement that enhances citizen service experience by providing straightforward, always-on access to all citizens. We work collaboratively with public sector organisations to deliver the right cloud services to make this possible.

 “Six Degrees is a cloud agnostic managed service provider, focused on consulting with our public sector clients as to where to host their services, and ensuring they are on the most appropriate secure, scalable, future-proofed infrastructure platforms, whether that means public, private, multi- or hybrid cloud. We have been awarded a place on the Scottish Government’s new Cloud Services Framework following a competitive tender process. This allows us to bring our considerable cloud capabilities to Scotland, enabling Scottish public sector organisations’ digital transitions and allowing them to improve the citizen services they deliver.”

Key services offered by Six Degrees through the Cloud Services Framework include:

• Public and Community Cloud. Six Degrees’ Public and Community Cloud services offer compliant, high-performing and secure cloud and managed service solutions to public sector organisations that support the digital transformation of legacy systems.
• Cloud Assessment. Six Degrees’ Cloud Assessment facilitates building data-driven solution proposals to migrate and transform existing infrastructure workloads to the cloud (public, private, community or hybrid) or between clouds for optimal organisational outcomes and efficiency.
• Managed Hyperscale Public Cloud. Microsoft Azure. Six Degrees’ Managed Hyperscale Public Cloud offering is focused on managing and supporting customer environments on public cloud, optimised for the best possible organisational outcomes whilst conforming to public sector security recommendations.
• Colocation. Six Degrees’ secure and flexible Colocation solutions are delivered from Tier III+ data centres, providing optimal uptime, availability and security whilst meeting Scottish public sector organisations’ data sovereignty requirements.