UKCloud wins OpenStack Superuser Award
May 12, 2017
UKCloud, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has this week won the OpenStack Superuser Award at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. UKCloud is this year’s joint winner with Paddy Power Betfair. The OpenStack Superuser Awards launched in 2014 to recognise organisations that have used OpenStack to meaningfully improve their business while contributing back to the community. Previous winners include multi-billion pound global organisations such as AT&T, CERN, Comcast and NTT Group. UKCloud successfully competes with generalist hyperscale providers by delivering specialist features, such as comprehensive assurance, that are cost-effective and relevant to the UK public sector. The company works closely with a strategic partner, Red Hat, to innovate the OpenStack platform by developing industry-leading security features, including two-factor authentication, secure networking and IP whitelisting. The company’s OpenStack platform is optimised for cloud native applications requiring the elasticity of a genuine public cloud platform coupled with the unique layers of assurance, sovereignty and secure government connectivity inherent to the UKCloud service.
"UKCloud is helping the UK government innovate with an assured cloud platform that supports services including online tax returns and genomic data analytics amongst many other key citizen facing applications,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenStack Foundation. “With a cloud-first strategy and a commitment to open standards built on technologies like OpenStack, the UK government has saved £600 million and earned recognition from the United Nations as the most digitally advanced government in the world. This Superuser Award presented to UKCloud is an ideal reflection of the power of OpenStack to transform IT."
“We’re delighted to be recognised as a global leader in the OpenStack community with this year’s Superuser Award,” said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud. “This accolade is an excellent endorsement of our open-source cloud platform, built on Red Hat OpenStack. It is also an award that we share with all our innovative partners and UK public sector customers who drive our roadmap.”
UKCloud provides its public sector customers with a choice of cloud platforms to meet their disparate workload requirements. When the UK government first adopted a cloud first policy, most of the quick wins involved moving virtualised workloads onto UKCloud’s Enterprise Compute Cloud, that is powered by VMware cloud technology. UKCloud has also introduced a cloud platform powered by Oracle technologies specifically for customers with existing Oracle systems that they want to move, cost-effectively, into the cloud. More recently its customers have moved from simply seeking to transition existing applications to the cloud, to building new cloud native applications which are inherently more dynamic and elastic. To best support these new types of applications, UKCloud has developed an open-source based alternative to the generalist global cloud platforms.
As Hanford continued: “UKCloud is greatly honoured to have won such a prestigious award from the OpenStack community so early in our OpenStack journey. This recognition, in addition to the increasing demand from our customers, validates our strategy to continue innovating on OpenStack and contributing to this thriving open-source community.” UKCloud’s was recently announced as the fastest growing technology company in the Sunday Times Hiscox Techtrack 100 Awards, gained a double award win in the 2017 UK Cloud Awards – where the company was recognised as the Best Cloud Provider and G-Cloud Provider – and its first Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation, which was announced last month.