What Is G-Cloud?
What is G-Cloud?
G-Cloud is a key pillar of government ICT policy and a framework through which public sector bodies can buy cloud services.
It allows you as a public sector body to achieve considerable ICT cost saving and bring your supplier relationships under cost and scope control. It is “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable ICT resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or cloud provider interaction.”
It fosters common community services and hence provides an open, visible, commoditised and cost transparent marketplace that allows you to benefit from:
- Large, cross government economies of scale
- ICT systems that are flexible and responsive to demand and support government policies and strategies
- New technologies that deliver faster business benefits and reduce costs
- Meeting environmental and sustainability targets
- A dynamic and responsive supplier marketplace that supports innovative and emerging suppliers.
The G-Cloud Strategy
The Government’s G-Cloud strategy is to deliver multi-tenanted cloud services to significantly reduce cost, which will involve both public and community clouds. Accessing your ICT services in a flexible and agile fashion will allow you as an organisation to buy only the services needed, when they are needed and then reuse them as they are needed.
In adopting this strategy however, it is extremely important for you to ensure your cloud service still provides an acceptable level of security and allows your organisation to demonstrate they are meeting their legal and statutory obligations as far as information is concerned.
The Cloud Models
In general, cloud solutions can be deployed through primarily four different models – private, public, hybrid and community, as shown below. However the Government’s chosen direction is to use community and public clouds, which will rely on multi-tenancy to reduce cost but this will raise security concerns unless the required security levels have been accounted for within your providers cloud architecture.
Standard Cloud Models:
- For private cloud the infrastructure is managed and operated solely for an organisation
- For public cloud the infrastructure is owned by a cloud provider and accessible to the general public or a large industry group
- For community cloud the infrastructure is shared by several organisations.
Secure Multi-Tenanted Cloud (SMTC) Supports Your Cloud & Security Needs
SMTC gives you the benefit of multi-tenanted (community) cloud services whilst ensuring that their provision meets the security levels you require.
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Meeting security requirements in a multi-tenanted environment is the reason why we have developed our UK-based Secure Multi-Tenanted Cloud (SMTC).”
SCC also provides all aspects of cloud provision through our Optimise Cloud Services, however it is the SMTC set of services that are particularly focussed on supporting your specific public sector security needs.
