Microsoft’s Azure Stack hybrid cloud offering will combine with UKCloud with its own accredited, government-grade platform powered by Cisco’s “world-class integrated infrastructure” as part of the agreement to create new hybrid opportunities for the UK public sector.

‘Advocate of the cloud’

Joanna Smith, CIO at the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, commented: “As a big advocate of cloud, I have always appreciated the role that it has played in helping us to modernise our infrastructure, implement new clinical technology and enhance our overall flexibility and productivity.

“In many ways we have been a few steps ahead of other organisations, many of which are still struggling with complex legacy-based technology estates and still retain concerns about the move to the cloud.

“This collaboration between Microsoft and UKCloud should help dispel many of their concerns – with the enhanced assurance, UK data sovereignty and direct connection to government networks, like N3 and HSCN, that it offers.”

‘Maximising developer productivity’

Microsoft’s strategy of consistency between Azure and Azure Stack will enable public sector organisations in the UK to build and deploy applications using exactly the same APIs, DevOps tools and portal, thereby maximising developer productivity.

Michael Wignall, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, continued: “The UK Government is a digital leader, particularly with its original ‘cloud first’ and now ‘cloud native’ policies.

“As one of the country’s leading technology providers, we see it as our responsibility to help meet and encourage these new initiatives and have invested locally to ensure we are up to the task.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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The service will support computational and visualisation intensive workloads for UKCloud’s UK public sector and healthcare customers.

UKCloud’s GPU-accelerated cloud service, branded as Cloud GPU, is available in two versions:

• UKCloud’s Cloud GPU Compute: This is a GPU accelerated computing service, based on the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU and supports applications developed using NVIDIA CUDA, that enables parallel co-processing on both the CPU and GPU. Typical use cases include looking for cures, trends and research findings in medicine along with genomic sequencing, data mining and analytics in social engineering, and trend identification and predictive analytics in business or financial modelling and other applications of AI and deep learning.
• UKCloud’s Cloud GPU Visualisation: This is a virtual GPU (vGPU) service, utilising the NVIDIA Tesla M60, that extends the power of NVIDIA GPU technology to virtual desktops and apps. In addition to powering remote workspaces, typical use cases include military training simulations and satellite image analysis in defence, medical imaging and complex image rendering.

Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud, said: “Building on the foundation of UKCloud’s secure, assured, UK-Sovereign platform, we are now able to offer a range of cloud-based compute, storage and GPU services to meet our customers’ complex workload requirements.”

UKCloud is the only provider that specialises in public sector and healthcare, which offers Cloud GPU computing services with NVIDIA GPUs.

“The public sector is driving more complex computational and visualisation intensive workloads than ever before, not only for CAD development packages, but also for tasks like the simulation of infrastructure changes in transport, for genetic sequencing in health or for battlefield simulation in defence,” added Hansford.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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UKCloud’s Cloud Native Infrastructure will provide a “flexible and agile” environment for the provider of non-clinical ICT solutions and services, to “innovate and continually enhance” the services that it brings to the healthcare market.

As a specialist in healthcare technology for nearly 20 years, Egton identified UKCloud as an organisation with a similar drive in improving access to information in critical UK markets.

Edward Bellamy, product director at Egton, explained: “We were looking for excellent performance and great support. UKCloud delivers on both fronts. The company’s specialist hands-on experience in the UK healthcare sector ensured we could provide the level of enhanced security and assurance that our clients in the healthcare sector value.”

Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud, added: “Being competitive on performance and price is important to us, but the real value that we provide to our customers comes from our specialist understanding both of the market that we serve and of the needs of our customers across healthcare and the public sector in the UK.

“Not only do we, as specialists in the market, provide all the security and assurance that customers in this market expect, but we also back it up with truly excellent customer service, starting with the dedicated technical account managers that we offer to all our customers for free.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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