UKCloud secures investment from Digital Alpha

UKCloud has grown rapidly to become the leading cloud provider supporting digital transformation across the UK public sector. The recipient of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for its innovation in developing a unique multi-cloud platform, UKCloud brings together the best hyperscale cloud technologies and traditional Enterprise technologies on a single platform hosted within its secure UK data centre facilities. UKCloud enables resource-constrained public sector organisations a low risk way of modernising existing IT, whilst also facilitating the development of modern cloud native digital solutions which require services such as Azure, Docker and Kubernetes.

UKCloud has made a series of significant announcements recently, through the introduction of UKCloud Health which provides specialised services to the Health and Life Sciences community, and the launch of UKCloudX which delivers the UK’s first cloud platform suited to the most sensitive needs of the UK’s Defence and National Security organisations.

The investment from Digital Alpha, which enjoys a strategic collaboration agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc., will support the enhancement and expansion of teams and technologies behind the UKCloud multi-cloud platform – as well as strengthening the alignment with networking leader Cisco in the UK, who will have a new route to market with UKCloud through joint sales and marketing activities.

Minister for Digital, Margot James, said: “We are committed to making the UK the best place to start and grow a digital business and I’m delighted to see UKCloud attracting funding from international investors to scale up their operations. This is another vote of confidence in our talented sector and will help us maintain our reputation as the leading destination in Europe for inward investment.”

On the investment, Digital Alpha Managing Partner Rick Shrotri said “We are delighted to have the opportunity to make an investment into UKCloud, which has established itself as a highly differentiated provider in a market that is ripe for rapid growth due to the low levels of cloud penetration across the UK public sector. UKCloud has developed a unique multi-cloud platform that is engineered to achieve government-grade assurance and native connectivity which creates significant opportunities for digital transformation in Defence, National Intelligence and other new sectors. Our additional capital will help UKCloud scale its team of award-winning multi-cloud experts and to also shape new product lines that are pre-packaged with Cisco's multi-cloud offering”.

Cisco were one of UKCloud’s first alliance partners, providing many of the data centre technologies which power the UKCloud platform.  Scot Gardner, Chief Executive, Cisco UK & Ireland said “We believe that in collaborating with UKCloud to deliver leading cloud technology solutions, we have the ability to help enable real transformation of essential government services. With unique requirements and extremely diverse operations, digital technology deployed in the sector has to meet the highest standards of security and reliability. Cisco and UKCloud have developed a strong working relationship with the aim of helping to support the UK’s digitisation plans with meaningful business transformation.”

UKCloud was created to provide a secure, scalable and cost-effective cloud platform to drive the digital transformation of public services in the UK. The platform is hosted entirely within the same secure facilities as Crown Hosting and operated by security-cleared experts to provide a safe and trusted environment for government workloads. The UKCloud platform brings together previously disconnected datasets and systems to provide a foundation for more effective collaboration and greater use of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence to create new insights. Further, the UKCloud platform creates clear opportunities for its partners to specialise and provide value-added services that help customers achieve their outcomes. The UKCloud partner programme consists of more than 300 partners including the leading system integrators, managed service providers and independent software vendors delivering Software-as-a-Service solutions specific to public sector communities. 

Simon Hansford, CEO UKCloud said: “The investment from Digital Alpha demonstrates their confidence in our differentiated business model and gives us tremendous potential to scale, accelerate our growth in the UK public sector saving taxpayer money and driving better insights for decades to come. Importantly our alignment with Cisco is a force multiplier, enabling our product development and helping us further differentiate from our competitors enabling us to accelerate our investment in sales, marketing, customer experience and new markets.”