UKCloud Launching DR to Cloud

UKCloud Ltd, a cloud services company, announced DR to the cloud, a self-service replication and recovery solution, powered by DR software provider, Zerto Ltd.

As UK citizens increasingly expect to be able to access services online, around the clock, it has become more important for public sector departments to invest in a backup plan in the event of their local data centre suffering an outage or service disruption. Available across all government networks, DR to the cloud enables public sector organisations to use the UKCloud platform as a cost-effective environment to recover from IT failures.

The service mitigates a range of failure scenarios that can affect a local data centre – including power cuts and natural disasters – as well as providing protection against application failures, including unsuccessful software updates, and malicious cyber-attacks. The Zerto technology enables customers to roll-back cloud-based VMs and workloads to a known safe state, allowing services to be restored rapidly, minimising downtime and data loss.

“It is crucial for our public sector customers to ensure that in the event of a disaster, their essential public services would face little or no disruption,” said Simon Hansford, CEO, UKCloud. “Having a DR plan in place is mandated by the Civil Contingencies Act, but traditional DR solutions are expensive and inefficient. We’re delighted to be offering this new service, which will help our customers meet their BC objectives with a flexible and cost-effective solution.“

Once an organisation has implemented DR to the cloud, protected applications are securely copied and stored on the UKCloud platform, which acts as the recovery site. In the event of an application being compromised, the organisation is able to recover the application to the UKCloud platform and, in so doing, make the service available to office-based users as well as mobile users (to mitigate the risk of the entire office or site becoming unavailable).

DR to the cloud is based on a pay-as-you-use cloud model; organisations can select applications that are crucial for the provision of public services, and therefore only pay for the DR or BC that is needed.

Hansford added: “DR to the Cloud has been specifically designed with our public sector customers in mind. It is ideal for protecting sensitive data and services that are depended on by UK citizens, patients and public sector workers.“

With DR to the cloud, organisations can:

• Replicate services and data from their existing data centre to UKCloud, thereby ensuring critical public services can survive local IT failures or other disasters
• Deliver BC and DR plans with RTOs and RPO that meet their individual requirements
• Validate DR and BC plans, by simulating them without disrupting live workloads or risking loss of data
• Use a self-service portal to control their own recovery processes and self-restore entire applications from any point in the journal

In addition to providing assurance, DR to the cloud will also help the public sector to embrace new technologies and digitise services. For instance, organisations who are looking to transition to the cloud but are hesitant about the impact on business operations, can use the service to test workloads on the UKCloud platform, whilst continuing to provide live services from an existing data centre. Organisations can also control the timing of their switchover and be assured that applications can be failed-back to their original state should any unforeseen problems arise.

UKCloud is exclusively focused on the UK public sector market. The company is fully UK sovereign and its services have been optimised for official and official-sensitive data. Furthermore, the firm is the only cloud provider to be connected to all government networks, including the Public Services Network (PSN) and N3/Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).