Carrenza, the public sector division of Six Degrees, an international managed service provider, has expanded its UK data centre presence to offer even more secure, compliant, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services to public sector customers. To facilitate this offering, Carrenza has opened two new availability zones in Government accredited Ark Data Centres in Corsham and Farnborough, with plans to work closely with Crown Hosting, also present in the facility. This expansion has doubled Carrenza’s public sector data centre footprint to four UK based availability zones and, as a List X facility, it will now be able to hold data higher than OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL SENSITIVE classifications.
Carrenza provides comprehensive cloud managed services to the UK public sector including both X86 and non-X86 based cloud hosting and multi-cloud managed services to support workloads in AWS and Azure. The core Carrenza IaaS solution acts as a ‘springboard to the cloud’ to bridge the gap between current outsourcing arrangements and true public cloud service delivery, allowing public sector bodies to get the commercial benefits of using the cloud now without the expensive upfront capital and time investments often associated with undertaking a full digital transformation programme. Now, due to the List X accreditation of Ark Data Centres, Carrenza is also able to hold confidential data higher than OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL SENSTITVE classifications, enabling it to offer a wider range of services to more public sector organisations.
Carrenza plans to work closely with Crown Hosting, which is a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and Ark Data Centres, dedicated to supplying specialised services to the UK public sector. Ark Data Centres are best in class facilities and, as the first ever to achieve the Uptime Institute’s Management and Operations accreditation, are maintained and audited to stringent standards. With Crown Hosting also being located in the same facility, Carrenza will be able to work with public sector organisations with applications hosted in Crown Hosting to offer a hybrid environment that facilitates seamless application and data migration for public sector customers with tight restrictions.
“We are delighted to be in the Ark Data Centre facility and looking forward to working closely with Crown Hosting to broaden our range of compliance offerings,” explained Andrew Mellish, Public Sector Business Manager at Carrenza. “We have found that public sector organisations often lag behind in adoption of technology advancements and we feel that together with Crown Hosting, we can make it far easier for them to develop their companies in line with other industries that have less data restrictions.”
James Henigan, Cloud Services Director, Six Degrees, added: “Cloud technology is a fundamental aspect of many successful IT environments. But public sector organisations have more restrictions than the average business, from budget to compliance, which can make cloud adoption challenging.” He concluded: “By working with Ark Data Centres we are confident that we can bring a tailored cloud offering to the public sector and enable more organisations to take advantage of this technology and better serve constituents.”
