SCC is first supplier to gain pan-government G-Cloud accreditation

23.08.2012
IT services company SCC has become the first supplier in the government's G-Cloud framework to achieve pan-government accreditation.

Nine services offered by SCC, including secure storage, back-up, managed and unmanaged virtual machines and email, have been successful in getting accredited.

Denise McDonagh, G-Cloud programme director said: "Increased use of technology, and the cloud in particular, provide a fantastic opportunity for public sector organisations to be more efficient and the G-Cloud programme is about establishing a flexible, cost-effective framework, which is also secure and meets the needs of the public sector so we're delighted that SCC is the first UK provider to gain pan-government accreditation."

The government launched its CloudStore in February, which saw 257 suppliers signed up to the G-Cloud framework and catalogued within an online portal. The government plans to accredit each service offered only once and then any government body can reuse that service without going through the accreditation process again.

However, no services that needed security assurance, until the announcement today, had been accredited.

"We're delighted. Our customers have been talking about G-Cloud for a long time, but their adoption of services was hampered by the lack of accredited solution," said Tracy Westall, SCC's UK public sector director.

"That situation has changed. We took a leading role from the beginning and it was important to us to remain focused on our vision and the goal of building a real G-Cloud service - think Amazon but built for the UK public sector, hosted in an environmentally-friendly UK data centre, operated by a UK company."

The to halve the number of security levels it uses internally from six to three in an attempt to simplify the accreditation process for suppliers looking to provide services to the public sector.

It applies a Business Impact Level (IL) classification to suppliers to indicate the security level of their services. IL0 (protected) is the lowest level of security, while IL6 (top secret) is the highest. IL2 is often the minimum requirement for government services, for example, it is the minimum requirement for providers bidding for network contracts.

"The government has a complex security marking scheme, there are six levels. We are trying to simplify that to just three to see if we can get most of government in the lowest level for most of its business," said Andy Nelson, government CIO.