Public Services Assurance & Accreditation Board awards Public Services Network Accreditation Certificate for Skyscape’s Pan-Government Accredited solutions

London – 26 November 2013 – Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, today announced that the Public Services Assurance & Accreditation Board (PSAAB) has issued Skyscape with a Public Services Network (PSN) Accreditation Certificate. This allows UK Public Sector organisations to connect securely to Skyscape’s Pan Government Accredited cloud solutions via the PSN.

In addition to the Accreditation Certificate, Skyscape is also now one of a very small number of cloud providers offering Compute, Storage and Email services to be formally recognised as a PSN Service Provider (PSNSP) offering services at IL2 and IL3. This accreditation sees Skyscape become one of only three Compute providers to be PSN accredited, the only PSN accredited provider offering Storage and one of two offering accredited Email services.

“PSN Accreditation Certificate for our cloud services is another milestone” commented Simon Hansford, CTO of Skyscape Cloud Services. “As the G-Cloud Framework continues to drive competition and innovation in the UK public sector IT market, it’s great that we’re able to stand out by offering our customers resilient and assured services that are connected to the PSN.”

“Following Pan Government Accreditation of our services at IL2 and IL3, and our recent ISO20000 announcement, this accreditation provides further testimony of our commitment to meeting the assurance needs and service standards that our UK public sector customers demand,” continued Hansford. “We’re proud to be leading and innovating the cloud services market in the UK and remain committed to ensuring our services are aligned to the Government ICT agenda. The PSN provides an assured network over which government can safely share services and collaborate in new ways, more effectively and efficiently. The fact our accredited services can now be delivered over the PSN means our customers can achieve these benefits without compromising security or performance.”

Central government departments and organisations across the wider public sector are advancing with plans to transition to PSN connectivity. To support this initiative, Skyscape will run its GSI and PSN (IL3) connections in parallel. Skyscape has a high capacity and resilient PSN circuit installed into each of its data centres and uses inter data centre connectivity to provide additional resiliency through triangulation. The PSN will act as a gateway between organisations connected to GSI and organisations connected to PSN (and vice versa). This will allow customers on GSI to prepare their solution to work over PSN. Skyscape will then transition its GSI service onto PSN until eventually all customers will be on the PSN.

Skyscape’s secure, sustainable and compliant services are delivered with leading technologies from its Alliance Partners: QinetiQ, VMware, Cisco, EMC and Ark Continuity. Since the launch of the G-Cloud programme in February 2012, Skyscape has been a major supplier to the Framework and together with its partners, accounts for a significant number of the accredited cloud services that are available. Skyscape is currently working on over 100 projects across central government, local authorities, police, healthcare and other publicly funded bodies.