Leading provider of assured cloud services to the UK public sector is sponsoring and providing infrastructure services to bolster the national pool of cyber security skills

London - September 2 2014 - Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave cloud services company, has been selected to deliver infrastructure services for the Cyber Security Challenge UK, due to its experience in providing secure cloud services to the UK public sector. The Cyber Security Challenge UK (www.cybersecuritychallenge.org.uk) runs a series of national competitions - which will run on Skyscape's assured platform - learning programmes and networking initiatives that are designed to identify, inspire and enable more UK citizens to become cyber security professionals and thereby bolster Britain's cyber expertise.
"Educating and training new cyber talent is crucial for our economy and we are proud to be supporting the Cyber Security Challenge in its efforts to improve information security skills in the UK," said Phil Dawson, CEO of Skyscape Cloud Services. "From our perspective, as a rapidly growing business, we need to recruit and develop the best and brightest talent in the industry in order to continue delivering assured cloud services to our public sector customers - all of whom have considerable data protection requirements. There is much concern regarding the UK's predicted ‘cyber skills shortage', so it is great to see initiatives such as the Challenge helping to motivate and equip the next generation with the skills and knowledge required to defend the nation against  evolving cyber threats."
Skyscape's full range of assured cloud services have achieved the highest possible Pan Government Accreditation (PGA) status from CESG (The National Technical Authority for Information Assurance) - up to and including Impact Level (IL) 3 and so suitable for all data at OFFICIAL (including OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE).
"We have been delighted with the services that Skyscape has delivered to date," said Stephanie Daman, CEO of Cyber Security Challenge UK. "While it goes without saying that Skyscape's security credentials were very important to us, the agility, capability and capacity of its platform is crucial to the future development of our challenges. Skyscape's highly responsive service desk has also been a great support."
"Equipping UK businesses and individuals with the skills and expertise needed to ward off increasingly sophisticated cyber threats is understandably a top priority for the UK government," said Neil Cassidy, deputy director of CERT-UK - an organisation launched by the government to improve the co-ordination of national cyber incidents and to share technical information between countries. "Support and investment from organisations is essential to ensuring the success of important cyber initiatives, such as the Challenge, and in making the UK more resilient to cyber-attacks."
Skyscape recently announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organisation which aims to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Earlier this month, Skyscape was one of the first organisations to achieve certification for the government's new Cyber Essentials Plus scheme which is designed to improve the resilience of UK businesses to common cyber security threats, and provides for verifiable independent certification of their capabilities.