Crown Hosting Data Centres has entered a partnership with Trust Systems and Nutanix to provide a new Trust Cloud Hosting service.
The joint venture between the Cabinet Office and Ark Data Centres, which provides data centres specifically for the UK public sector, is taking the step to give organisations more scope for a flexible use of cloud services in line with its shared hybrid initiative.
Andrew Puddephatt, sales director for public sector at Nutanix, told UKAuthority that under the partnership Crown Hosting will continue to provide access to dedicated data centres, while Trust Systems will provide the management capability and Nutanix the software for organisations to shift applications and workloads towards public cloud services when needed.
This is intended to support the move towards a ‘cloud as appropriate’ approach.
Chris Boyes, chief operating officer at Trust Systems, said: “Experience has shown that public organisations are likely to have legacy applications and platforms that can’t be easily migrated to the cloud.
“By partnering with Nutanix we’re able to offer those customers the same immediate benefits by migrating those workloads to scalable, highly available and easy to manage hyperconverged Nutanix infrastructure, fully compliant with the DDAT playbook and other government security standards.
“Beyond that, Trust Cloud customers can also host their own fully segmented private cloud as well as access tools to build, run and manage applications on any cloud, balance workloads across clouds and focus on business outcomes rather than having to manage multiple platforms and technologies.”
IaaS details
Trust Cloud is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with hardware consisting of Tier 1 services running Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and a choice of virtualisation hypervisor, along with connecting using high performance off-the-shelf switching technologies, a dedicated high security firewall, a shared edge landing network and an intermediate core local area network.
“Mandated to take a ‘cloud first’ approach to IT, it’s easy for organisations to fall into the trap of thinking of cloud as a place rather than a model and that they have, necessarily, to move everything out of the data centre to one of the hyperscaler cloud platforms, like AWS or Azure,” Puddephatt said.
“But that’s not the case, moreover it can be highly disruptive as well as costly with no guarantee that any of the anticipated savings will be realised.
“This kind of ‘big bang’ cloud migration can also be a real shock to support teams needing to learn new skills and ways of working, on top of which there are technological, cost and support risks from locking into a single platform no matter who the provider.”
While the initial offering is an IaaS, Puddephatt said there are plans to develop platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service offerings over time.
Earlier this year the Crown Commercial Service published a new version of its procurement framework for Crown Hosting to run for seven years from March 2023.
