British SME joins G-Cloud

Award-winning British SME, Memset® has today announced they have been officially signed up to the IaaS/PaaS part of the G-Cloud Foundation Delivery Partner activities.

The announcement comes just days after the Westminster eForum event where Ministry of Justice official and previous G-Cloud project leader Martin Bellamy confirmed the project was definitely going ahead: "Anyone who thought the G-Cloud had gone a bit quiet, or that it's died — well, no it's not, it's alive and kicking. The vision remains intact, and there is increasing promise of delivery."

One of the visions of G-Cloud is for 25% of contracts to be awarded to SMEs. Memset®, a family-owned, 100% British business which has lead the UK’s virtual machine market in terms of price and quality since 2002 with their Miniserver VM® technology, is delighted to become G-Cloud  foundation delivery partner.

The next step is for their Miniserver VM® virtual server and Memstore™cloud storage services to go through accreditation with CESG’s new pan government accreditor. Some of the commercial aspects also need to be finalised, but the aspiration is to be able to provide IaaS to government via the G-Cloud framework as early as January 2012.

Memset® have held IS27001 certification for many years and have been building on security in preparation for government work. They believe that they will be able to cater to most of the government’s requirements (up to Impact Level 2) using their existing facilities and systems, and intend to do so at the same market-leading, transparent pricing available to private sector clients.  For the PaaS element they intend to offer servers with their managed service level agreement, where Memset® maintains the operating system as well as the common infrastructure software.

Memset®’s managing director, Kate Craig-Wood, who was technical co-lead on phase two of the G-Cloud project said: “SMEs are going to be a vital part of the G-Cloud ecosystem and as part of the detailed architecture for the G-Cloud that we proposed we envisaged ways to facilitate their entry. Speaking as one of the SME’s on Intellect UK’s main board I’m also especially pleased that government appear to be trying to make good on their 25% promise.”

“To be a part of G-Cloud from its outset is an honour and we look forward to contributing to what G-Cloud is all about - a collection of cloud infrastructures, services and applications that the government hasn’t paid anyone up-front to build, but instead is consumed on a pay as you go basis,” said Craig-Wood.

Memset® is fully committed to the project. As part of their roadmap for G-Cloud they are currently developing their Miniserver VM® platform to allow management via an easy-to-use control panel as well as the more usual API approach, as well as looking to make an investment in more secure facility to be able to host more sensitive government data (Impact Level 3).

The G-Cloud strategy claims that it could save the government £3.2bn of its annual £16bn ICT budget, however Craig-Wood believes that the government should actually be aiming for a 70-80% savings on their ICT spend from the G-Cloud, “if done properly, G-Cloud has the potential to be hugely disruptive and could be saving the government £12bn per year by 2020,” concluded Craig-Wood.