Aberdeen’s ‘truly digital’ ambition
Aberdeen City Council is installing a fibre network to the majority of its sites to enable it to meet its ambitious digital city plans.
It will use the Capita-managed Scottish Wide Area Network (SWAN) to link the council’s 188 educational and corporate establishments together – with more than half of the circuits delivered using fibre, in conjunction with Capita’s fibre partner CityFibre Limited. The connectivity will provide the Council with the ability to increase bandwidth and enhance digital services to schools, leisure centres and a range of other council owned sites.
Councillor Willie Young, convener of finance, policy and resources, at the council, said Aberdeen has “ambitions to become a truly digital city, providing high quality services to local residents and reinforcing the city as an attractive location for business.
“Being part of SWAN has led to a greater level of collaboration and sharing across the public sector - Aberdeen is benefiting from that both functionally and financially. In bringing high-speed connectivity to the city centre, we are making a real statement to the global business community in terms of stimulating and attracting new investment into the city.”
UKCloud first to ISO27018 Information Security Certification
UKCloud (formerly Skyscape) has achieved certification against the ISO27018 information security standard, for the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in public clouds. It is the first UK company to be awarded this status by certification body, LRQA. The company has also successfully re-certified against the ISO20000 standard for IT Service Management for a further three years.
The new standard has a specific focus on cloud privacy and the protection of personal data. ISO27018-specific controls include the disclosure of the geographic location of personal data, processes for the notification of data disclosures and data breaches, requirements to disclose details of sub-contracted processing activities, and regulations related to a customer’s right to access and delete personal data. It aligns closely with many of the requirements of the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).
“As cloud computing becomes more widely adopted, public sector organisations with considerable data protection responsibilities understandably have significant concerns when it comes to how their information is processed, stored and protected,” said John Godwin, director of compliance and information assurance at UKCloud. “ISO27018 delivers a more comprehensive framework of controls when it comes to the protection of personally identifiable data in the cloud.”
ASA opts for disaster recovery as a service
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has chosen Claranet to develop and host a state-of-the-art disaster recovery platform, fully interoperable with ASA’s existing platform.
The fully managed, hosted ‘disaster recovery as a service’ (DRaaS) solution uses VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to automatically replicate virtualised applications to a secure cloud platform. The cloud recovery environment is hosted at Claranet’s own UK-based data centre.
“Moving to a fully managed, hosted disaster recovery platform meant that we avoided the expense and effort of provisioning the environment ourselves, as well as the ongoing cost of staffing and general overhead. If there are any problems, Claranet will be there to see that they are resolved right away, which saves us a considerable amount of effort. With Claranet managing everything, we don’t even have to think about it,” said Giles King, systems manager at ASA.
