Carrenza expands public sector footprint with move into Ark Data Centres

Carrenza, the public sector-focused arm of managed service provider Six Degrees, has set up two additional availability zones within Ark Data Centres’ government-accredited colocation facilities.

The expansion doubles Carrenza’s public sector datacentre footprint, from two sites to four, which it uses to provide cloud hosting and support for public sector organisations running workloads in both the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds.

Ark Data Centres’ facilities are also home to the Cabinet Office-backed Crown Hosting Service, which launched in March 2015 to give the public sector a centralised colocation hub in which to house their non-cloud datacentre workloads.

The facilities are designed to meet the needs of public sector organisations that need to host information that spans the government’s entire data classification spectrum, meaning Carrenza is now able to host confidential data at “Official” classifications.

Thomas Konopka, sales director of Six Degrees and Carrenza public sector, said the firm was looking forward to exploring the opportunities to roll out crossover services with Crown Hosting, given they are now effectively stable mates within Ark’s facilities.

In particular, the company claimed the arrangement should give rise to opportunities for Crown Hosting users to draw on Carrenza’s infrastructure to host their applications within a hybrid cloud setup, for example.

“We have found that public sector organisations often lag behind in adoption of technology advancements, and we feel that in supporting Crown Hosting Data Centres, we can make it far easier for them to develop their digital transformation strategies in line with other industries that have less data restrictions,” said Konopka.

Peter McShane, head of sales at Crown Hosting Data Centres, backed this view, saying there were “multiple pressures” preventing public sector organisations from moving as quickly as they would like on digital transformation projects, “from limited budgets to stringent compliance requirements”.

“Carrenza will add to the comprehensive portfolio of efficient, secure and affordable multi-cloud solutions available to the UK public sector on the Crown Campus as organisations transform to cloud-native applications,” said McShane.