ICT secure services provider, FCO Services, a Trading Fund of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, specialises in work for the UK Government and public sector, and has just received Pan Government Accreditation for its cloud platform, Government Secure Applications Environment (GSAE).
The GSAE platform was created by FCO Services to supply secure cloud applications and services to the public sector through the government’s G-Cloud framework and CloudStore.
It maps onto the Business Impact Levels that are used to guide discussions of risk in government projects. Business impact level 3 (IL3) is suitable for use at Official level under the new Government security classifications that came into use at the beginning of this month..
The accreditation granted to GSAE is up to and including IL3, and covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - providing access to virtual servers and storage to allow departments to move their services to the cloud – and Platform as a Service (PaaS). This provides the hardware and operating environment to allow departments to host their applications securely.
The GSAE platform was designed by FCO Services to help public sector organisations make efficiency savings without the risk of compromising data. It is already in use by several government departments and operates 24/7 from FCO Services’ UK-based secure facilities, on secure government owned sites.
“Achieving IL3 Pan Government Accreditation (PGA) is a significant milestone for FCO Services and for GSAE,” said FCO Services’ Chief Executive Chris Moxey. “Although our infrastructure and hardware had been rigorously tested and verified, this additional accreditation can only benefit our customers. PGA makes our secure cloud-based offerings even more accessible and will give public sector organisations added confidence in our services.
“The accreditation further demonstrates that making the move to flexible, low cost and yet highly secure cloud services as laid out in the Government’s ICT Strategy, is now an achievable goal across government and the wider public sector”.
