SME Arcus brings AWS IaaS and PaaS to public sector with G-Cloud

UK public sector organisations will be able to use AWS cloud services through the G-Cloud framework as UK SME Arcus Global becomes the first and only certified Amazon Web Services reseller on the government’s G-Cloud framework.

As part of the third G-Cloud supplier framework, Arcus Global will provide government organisations with AWS’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) technologies, including cloud storage services and cloud database services. The services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon VPC, AWS Import/ Export and CloudSearch among others.

It will also offer auxiliary consultancy services on AWS cloud deployment to the public sector organisations.

“Giving UK public sector organisations the opportunity to procure Amazon Web Services technologies, via the G-Cloud framework, allows them to focus their resources on doing what they do best, which is delivering new services and value to the citizens of the UK, and not on maintaining and running technology infrastructure,” said Denis Kaminskiy, managing director of Arcus Global.

AWS’s entry into G-Cloud framework via a supplier comes just days after the Cabinet Office confirmed that the cloud will be mandated as the first choice for all IT purchases in government.

The government said it aims to get 50% of all new IT spending to go through the G-Cloud by 2015 as the third G-Cloud framework went live.

Of the 708 suppliers on the third G-Cloud framework, about 80% are SMEs.

Kaminskiy said AWS will support it to help public sector customers of all sizes design, architect, migrate and build new applications on the public cloud platform.

The Cambridge-based SME is already working with public sector organisations such as Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Tandridge District Council, Leicestershire and Rutland Probation Trust, English Heritage and Buckinghamshire County Council.

Its customer Buckinghamshire County Council is launching a pilot to migrate locally run applications to AWS's IaaS platform.

AWS was chosen for the general usage stream of the pilot because of its market-leading position and alignment with the council’s security requirements for most of its applications, according to Arcus Global.

Buckinghamshire County Council is hoping the IaaS technologies will help it reduce costs and increase the flexibility of the services it runs.