The leading UK-managed hosting and cloud provider UKFast has announced a two-year contract with ResilienceDirect. The 24-month contract for the free, live, critical, digital service marks the company’s second consecutive G-Cloud 12 framework award for the contract.
Funded by the Cabinet Office since 2014, ResilienceDirect enables organisations such as the police, fire and rescue, ambulance, local authorities, utilities, shopping centres, arenas, search and rescue, and coastguards to securely share information, training and best practice when responding to incidents.
The platform has been utilised to coordinate 7620 live responses to date, including the G7 Summit, unexploded WWII bombs in Exeter and Goole, floodings and a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With more and more people accessing the platform – and an increase in cyber security attacks in recent years – maintaining the security and integrity of ResilienceDirect is a top priority.
UKFast is at the heart of this, giving ResilienceDirect and its resilience communities reassurance that sensitive information always remains secure. With fully owned, police-assured, UK data centres, and a UK based disaster recovery site, UKFast is able to fulfil the highest availability SLA of 99.999%, and go over and above this to make sure there’s never an outage.
UKFast will continue to host, support and manage the infrastructure which underpins ResilienceDirect, monitoring the platform 24/7/365 to ensure continuous availability, with no downtime.
Luana Avagliano, Head of ResilienceDirect, said, “The mission of ResilienceDirect is to save lives and keep the UK safe. The partnership with UKFast is helping us achieve this as the team regularly go above and beyond and are always there when we need support. This is not just a contract, this is about the public good and giving back to the community, and UKFast understands this.”
On the average day, ResilienceDirect might have 300 concurrent users online – but this could quickly jump up to 10,000 during a major national incident. UKFast’s VMware cloud solution has the capacity to vastly scale up at a moment’s notice, so there’s no chance of delays or lags during an emergency.
Stephen Jewell, Director of Public Sector at UKFast, added, “We understand the impact ResilienceDirect has for our emergency service workers, and being awarded a new contract is acknowledgement of the trust ResilienceDirect has in what we do. At the very highest level, we are committed to evolving the platform to ensure Britain’s emergency services continue to have the best tools available to keep us all safe and protected.”
To find out more about ResilienceDirect and UKFast’s partnership, visit both companies at The Emergency Services Show 2021.
