User:SamanthaPhillips4646/sandbox

Background
Skyscape Cloud Services provides cloud computing services to the UK public sector, to help increase efficiencies, reduce costs, significantly improve procurement times and increase transparency. It describes its services as easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave to highlight the fact that its customers remain in complete control at all times, with minimum risk,. Skyscape's services are Pan Government Accredited (PGA) up to IL3 and so suitable for all data at OFFICIAL (including OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE).

Skyscape was started in 2012 in response to the Government ICT Strategy, which outlined the need to invest in technology as a way to facilitate the changes needed to deliver high quality and value to the 30,000 UK public sector organisations. To this end, Skyscape offers a genuine pay-by-the-hour service, which delivers significant cost savings to its customers, who are able to turn servers off during evenings and weekends, or can alternatively, rapidly scale services at times of peak demand. There is no minimum contract with Skyscape and its services can be provisioned within minutes, giving customers rapid access to new resources.

Skyscape is focused on providing cloud services in a more agile, secure and cost-effective manner. It states that it strives to deliver solutions that harness technology as a way to facilitate the changes that are needed to streamline processes and reduce costs to support the UK public sector and, ultimately, UK citizens and taxpayers.

Cloud services offered by Skyscape
Skyscape’s full offering consists of:
 * Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – seven offerings around Compute and Storage on demand
 * Software as a Service (SaaS) – offerings for email and collaboration as well as secure sync-and-share of files to help teams work effectively in groups, using a variety of devices
 * Platform as a Service (PaaS) – based upon Open Source Cloud Foundry and Hadoop which provides organisations the benefits of using a commodity cloud platform without the added management overheads

All of Skyscape’s UK sovereign cloud computing services are hosted in one (or both) of its highly resilient Tier 3 UK data centres in Farnborough and Corsham. Skyscape services are delivered with leading technologies from the Skyscape Alliance Partners: QinetiQ, VMware, Cisco, EMC and Ark Data Centres. Skyscape works with its Cloud Alliance in order to drive innovation and technical product development, and therefore continually improve Skyscape’s offering to meet the needs of the UK public sector.

Skyscape customers
A firm supporter of the UK Government’s G-Cloud programme, Skyscape has achieved considerable success to date, having won a number of high-profile contracts with public sector organisations, including the GOV.UK, Cabinet Office, Home Office, HMRC and MOD. Indirectly, via partners, Skyscape also provides infrastructure that hosts a large number of other central government departments, and a growing number of local authorities and independent government organisations. The company states that it aims to continually disrupt the market and is committed to conducting frequent assessments of its services, ensuring it is delivering innovative and cost-effective solutions to its public sector customers.

Recent news
Skyscape recently joined The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) – a not-for-profit organisation that aims to develop and promote best practice for providing security assurance within cloud computing – and is one of the first organisations to adopt the Government’s new Cyber Essentials Scheme and to achieve certification for the new Cyber Essentials Plus Scheme, demonstrating its ongoing commitment to delivering assured services to the public sector.

Skyscape was announced as the winner of the Pathfinder 20 index of the UK’s most exciting emerging technology companies in May 2014. This award win followed the announcement of a £4m minority stake investment from BGF (Business Growth Fund) – an independent company established to help Britain’s growing businesses – which is supporting the company’s rapid growth in the public sector market.

In June 2014, Skyscape was announced as the winner of the ‘Industry’ category in the Digital Leaders 100 Awards. The Digital Leaders 100 list represents a vibrant and exciting community of digital innovators from across the UK spanning both the government and private sector. As well as winning the Industry category, Skyscape was tenth overall in the list of 100 individuals, organisations and products making a real difference in the today’s world of citizen-facing digital services.