G-Cloud supplier, UKCloud wants to push into the cloud-hating healthcare market.
The outfit has opened a new division which will deliver a “sovereign, secure and open” platform to NHS bodies and the wider healthcare sector.
Dubbed UKCloud, Health the new division will learn from UKCloud’s government experience. The outfit saw a 37 per cent share of Infrastructure-as-a-Service spend through the G-Cloud public sector framework.
CEO Simon Hansford said that cloud adoption in government stands at eight per cent, compared with two per cent adoption in healthcare.
He said that the market is ripe, and when they see that there is a sovereign, secure and open platform they will go for it. He said the situation was similar when UKCloud launched six years ago.
It built a platform at its own cost and risk, and stood it up, and believed customers would come to us.
The new UKCloud Health platform is a replica of its existing platform and would encompass “tens of thousands of VMs and petabytes of storage”. It will run on the same physical datacentres, but it’s a segregated platform.
One important aspect of the platform is that it allows healthcare bodies, pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies to share data sets with each other and partners in the supply chain, where appropriate, Hansford explained.
Hansford said that UKFast is price neutral, and in the majority of cases cheaper, than AWS and Azure across the whole basket of storage and compute.
He also claimed the US hyperscalers’ recent investments in UK datacentres were “tiny” and that their data residency claims were no more than ‘FUD’.
Hansford pointed out that last week, Azure ran out of storage capacity in the UK, so moved customers over to the Netherlands. Amazon has also run out of a compute platform in the UK and moved over to Ireland.
The big outfits had made tiny investments in the UK to win hearts and minds and they don’t give data residency, let alone data sovereignty.
