UKCloud pins public sector hopes on Microsoft and Cisco pairing

Cloud provider's hybrid offering designed to woo public sector

UKCloud has extended its multi-cloud options with a Microsoft Azure hybrid offering for the public sector as the market battle for cloud supremacy continues.

The cloud provider will combine Microsoft's Azure Stack hybrid cloud offering with its own Cisco-powered integrated infrastructure.

UKCloud claimed the offering will allow public sector workloads with specific needs for data sovereignty and privacy to use Azure on the UKCloud platform.

"These new Azure capabilities, owned and operated by UKCloud … will empower customers to manage sovereignty, ensure assurance and become more connected than ever before," said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud.

"This new collaboration underpins our belief that there is a right cloud for every workload and brings together our respective strengths to deliver the best of both worlds. It also gives choice and flexibility to avoid lock-in."

Michael Wignall, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, said the UK government is a digital leader, particularly with its original Cloud First and now Cloud Native policies.

"We have worked side by side with the UK public sector for many years to ensure that workloads can run in our cloud and this new partnership with UKCloud and Cisco will enable us all to best serve those with more complex and evolving requirements by providing the best of Azure's hybrid offering," said Wignall.

Paul Garvey, head of government and national security for Cisco, said that "this collaboration between Cisco, Microsoft and UKCloud provides our customers with a solution which addresses their needs across a wide set of public sector use cases, bringing the best of all three together to further bolster the value that customers already see in UKCloud's platforms."

The UKCloud platform is powered by Cisco's Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack, which uses Microsoft's Azure cloud technology and Cisco's Unified Computing System and Cisco Nexus 9000 Cloud Scale switching technology.