Savvis announced the availability of its Government Wide Service (GWS) platform, an infrastructure as a service platform which it said is now open to all government departments and third party suppliers. 

 

The system makes data center infrastructure available at IL3 (Impact Level) and IL2, being the security layers that systems must operate on to adhere to public sector requirements. It opens up the prospect of pay as you go projects as part of the ‘G-Cloud’ the company said.

 

‘The key purpose is to deliver applications, securely and at low cost. In other models you would have to develop core infrastructure for each application. What we’ve done here is share the core infrastructure cost for government applications. This provides flexbility because they can use a  slice on a pay as you go model. You can have a sliced core infrastructure. We’re manging the infrastructure layer – and depending on the nature of the application – some will need tobe secured to Impact Level 3. There is an impact Level 4 which is not coverd by this,’ Neil Creswell, EMEA MD, Savvis, told Datacenterdynamics.

 

A major change in the availability of the GWS is that Savvis will now take a role in promoting it to Government departments. ‘Up until nowthe departments [the Home Office] have promoted it to others. What we’ve now agreed is that Savvis can promote it to the others.The concept is the difference between cloud and ASP technologies.It is a relatively new concept,’ Cresswell said.

 

The UK Ministry of Justice signed to use the service platform as part of a five year £14m deal. 

 

The MoJ will use the secure platform for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which is being designed by Steria and implemented by Accenture. The ERP system will deliver transactional and professional services to more than 80,000 users as part of MoJ’s Common Operating Model for human resources, finance, purchase and payroll systems. It is scheduled to be fully operational by spring 2013. 

 

Separetely Savvis announced a partner programme targeting systems integrators, IT companies and channel players.