HP Enterprise Services granted Pan-Government Accreditation at IL3 status following CSA STAR award

HP Enterprise Services says that its secure government cloud hosting service ECS-G VPC (Enterprise Cloud Service – Government Virtual Private Cloud) and desktop service WP360G (WorkPlace360G) have been granted Pan Government Accreditation (PGA) at Impact Level 3 (IL3).

HP’s IL3 accreditation covers all of the data centre, security and service management operations required to deliver cloud services. This extensive accreditation scope will significantly reduce the cost and effort required by government customers using ECS-G services to evidence the security compliance needed to achieve overall system accreditation. A Security Operations Centre (SOC) monitors all network and compute activity within the secure data centre. The SOC will in future also offer endpoint security services for customer infrastructures.

This follows the recent award of CSA STAR (Cloud Security Alliance Security Trust and Assurance Registry) silver certification for ECS-G from the BSI (British Standards Institute)– making HP the first major Cloud Service Provider in the UK to receive this award and one of the first to deliver IL3 (Restricted) level security within the Government Cloud framework. By having its security practices independently assessed and documented in a public repository, HP is demonstrating transparency and providing customers with further criteria for evaluating the capability of potential suppliers.

Combined with HP’s experience as the largest IT provider to the UK public sector, HP Enterprise Services gives government organisations a powerful platform for the transition to secure cloud services and has the potential to help the Government meet the flexibility and cost objective set out in its ICT Strategy.

“Our public sector clients in the UK are looking to find ways to lower their operating costs, realise their digital strategies and deliver improved services to citizens,” said Stuart Bladen, regional vice president, UK Public Sector. “Both the IL3 and CSA STAR accreditations reflect the commitment and investment that HP has made in the UK to create a cloud services delivery facility that meets the needs of both Central and Local Government”

All central and local government organisations can now consume secure cloud services with an assurance of supply that is necessary for an element of Critical National Infrastructure and that was previously only available to larger departments. Equally all government customers will benefit from the economies of scale that the new facility generates.

The facility also supports the government agenda for Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by providing a low cost entry point into the secure IT services market for SMEs. Over 700 SMEs are supported in HP’s UK supply chain with access to mentoring and support, to help achieve HP’s objective to help SMEs grow their businesses into new markets.

ECS-G VPC is delivered from HP-owned, UK data centres that are global benchmarks for energy efficiency. This enterprise-class cloud computing service provides flexible procurement models, Storage as a Service, physical and virtual server support.

The service also enables government bodies to deploy new applications more quickly. This is achieved by accessing client-specific configurations through an on-line portal, eliminating the usual time intensive processes required to bring a new service online.