Carrenza driving digital transformation of GOV.UK services

Executive summary: GOV.UK is the go-to place for UK citizens to access government information and services and uses Carrenza’s award winning Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud services.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is leading the digital transformation of government and in 2012 launched GOV.UK, which won the prestigious ‘Design of the Year’ award in 2013. The website was described by Prime Minister David Cameron as an example of ‘world class IT and design talent, which enhanced the modern relationship between the public and government’.

Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza explains:

“The launch of GOV.UK was a significant milestone and is helping to change and improve the way government communicates with its citizens. It’s a shift that has to be supported by the right technologies and systems and that is where Carrenza’s award-winning infrastructure and platform services come in.”

Why Carrenza was chosen: GOV.UK is built in custom software developed in-house at GDS, and the team wanted to source cloud hosting and support for its flagship website.

Andrew Mellish, Carrenza’s Head of Public Sector Services, explains:

“The belief that technology should make government services better lies at the heart of what Carrenza does and our customers engage with us because of the simple and effective way we deliver our services.

“Initially Carrenza provided the infrastructure for GOV.UK’s ‘preview’ operation; but once we opened our second UK data centre and achieved OFFICIAL security accreditation, GDS moved the majority of GOV.UK’s ‘staging’ and ‘production’ systems to the Carrenza Cloud.”

GDS found Carrenza through the G-Cloud III framework and through a competitive tendering process decided that we offered the right blend of services.

• Reliability and availability – Carrenza’s service led approach and the agility and scalability of our infrastructure means we can quickly respond to the most demanding of requirements.
• Responsive technical support – we are able to support the GDS team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Carrenza can resolve calls in 15 minutes.
• Security and compliance – Carrenza has a robust security and compliance programme that meets the needs of Government OFFICIAL accreditation. We have shown our ability to provide bespoke security solutions that meet the needs of our customers, in tandem with our PGA OFFICIAL and PCI-DSS accreditations.
• Open source technology – Carrenza is committed to using the best open source technology available.

Andrew Mellish continues:

“Our experience in hosting digital services and working with developers on agile development projects means that our team understands what GDS is trying to achieve and how best to deliver the technologies they are using.

“That means when someone from GDS calls one of our engineers, they know they are speaking to an expert, someone who gets it and will work with them to ensure any challenge is resolved as efficiently as possible.”

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