This G-Cloud 10 service is no longer available to buy.

The G-Cloud 10 framework expired on Tuesday 2 July 2019. Any existing contracts with Six Degrees Technology Group Limited are still valid.
Six Degrees Technology Group Limited

OFFICIAL IaaS Compute and Storage

A secure cloud service that supports digital transformation, website hosting, ecommerce and transactional systems, and legacy environments (including Oracle hosting). Available via the internet and PSN (both PSN Protect and PSN Assured), is ideal for both test & development and production environments, supporting any X86 workload (including Windows and Linux).

Features

  • Aligned with NCSC Cloud Security Principles
  • Infrastructure automation and orchestration. VMware vCloud & OpenStack
  • Granular resource based hourly billing
  • Secure N+1 UK data centres. Data never leaves the UK
  • Choice of virtual and bare metal physical resource
  • ITIL based service delivery management and reporting
  • 24x7x365 availability, service desk, support, monitoring. 99.99% SLA/ availability guarantee
  • UK based dual site resiliency, including ARK (by Crown Hosting)
  • Onsite and offsite Backup and DR available
  • Connect via internet, PSN Assured or PSN Protect

Benefits

  • Highly secure for OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE data workloads
  • Ideal for both test & development and production environments
  • Hosting for digital services; applications, websites, portals and intranets
  • Move your legacy workloads to the cloud to reduce cost
  • Supports any application that runs on x86 architecture
  • Automation and orchestration to simplify processes and reduce cost
  • Easy to use. Self service portal & API. Supports containers
  • Rapidly deploy and scale servers and storage resource
  • Automate the deployment and installation applications and digital services
  • Oracle SPARC and OVM for X86 for legacy applications

Pricing

£0.01 a virtual machine an hour

  • Education pricing available
  • Free trial available

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 10

Service ID

7 6 8 6 7 8 8 9 4 2 6 4 7 8 8

Contact

Six Degrees Technology Group Limited Rob Walton
Telephone: 07813303485
Email: publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk

Service scope

Service constraints
No
System requirements
  • Requires min. 10 Mbps standard networking (includes reserved bandwidth)
  • X86 operating system and application (non x86 options available)

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
Public Sector Cloud has a 30 minutes first response SLA for Priority 1 incidents logged via our service desk. This is 1 hour for Priority 2 incidents.
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
Yes
Online ticketing support accessibility
WCAG 2.0 AAA
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
24 hours, 7 days a week
Web chat support
No
Onsite support
Yes, at extra cost
Support levels
Full support of services are provided as standard via the Public Sector Service Desk. The Service Desk is open Mon-Fri 07:00-19:00 and is manned by 1st/2nd line support engineers. The service desk has direct escalation to the operations team where full 3rd line support is provided.

Full out of hours support is also provided for all P1 and P2 incidents with clear escalation paths.

6DG also provide additional support services such as O/S and application monitoring, server support, patch management, managed backup, and managed DR services. Pricing is provided either per server or as a flat service fee depending on the size of the environment.

All customers are allocated a service delivery manager who is responsible for ensuring the smooth delivery of the service, acts as an escalation point for all incidents, and provides full monthly service reporting.
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
Our services are simple to consume requiring only a browser (and in the case of VMware vCloud a small plug in to be installed). New customers are asked to provide us with a list of authorised contacts and permission levels with whom we can engage and those nominated individuals are provided with documentation and if need be training on how to contact us for support, how to access the ticketing and monitoring portals and how to use VMware vCloud.

For all customers provide documentation for using the 6DG IaaS. In addition to the detailed documentation, 6DG can run individual and group training sessions for using these clouds.

At a base level 6DG do not charge customers to on-board. However, should an organisation require additional support as part of the on-boarding process, such as project management, detailed technical design, etc, then 6DG might need to charge for this. This will either be charged as time and materials (T&M) or as a pre-agreed flat service fee.

Once engaged and a contract has been signed, 6DG will provision a resource area and grant access to our self-service portal and ticketing system where support and service requests can be made to the Service Desk.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • Other
Other documentation formats
  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Visio
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
End-of-contract data extraction
Customers can export their servers to a OVF format and download to their local machines. Where necessary 6DG Service Desk can provide solutions for large or complicated migrations away from 6DG.
End-of-contract process
6DG do not charge for off-boarding as standard and organisations can exit the 6DG service without penalty. Where reasonable 6DG will support the client exit the service, export virtual machines, and decommission resource. If full project management or large-scale support is required then 6DG reserve the right to charge the client. This will be agreed in advance, prior to termination.

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Using the web interface
6DG have a vCloud Director portal to allow customers to fully manage their environment, such as building, editing and removing resource.
Web interface accessibility standard
WCAG 2.0 AAA
Web interface accessibility testing
6DG offer secure access via the VMware vCloud Director portal.
API
Yes
What users can and can't do using the API
All actions that you can perform by the GUI can be achieved via API.
API automation tools
  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • SaltStack
  • Terraform
  • Puppet
  • Other
Other API automation tools
Ernest
API documentation
Yes
API documentation formats
  • HTML
  • ODF
  • PDF
Command line interface
Yes
Command line interface compatibility
Linux or Unix
Using the command line interface
All actions that you can perform by the GUI can be achieved via the CLI

Scaling

Scaling available
Yes
Scaling type
  • Automatic
  • Manual
Independence of resources
Storage is sold based on fixed IOPS, meaning performance is guaranteed irrespective of other user requirements. We can also provide dedicated virtual and bare metal resource for customers who want to further protect their environment.

All customers pay for reserved bandwidth. 6DG monitor shared inbound connections at our peering level. If a customers usage becomes unusually high we will be alerted. Where necessary customers traffic will be restricted or black holed (in a DDoS attack) to protect our other customers bandwidth requirements. DDoS service options, both Layer 3/4 and Layer 7, are available as chargeable services should customers require.
Usage notifications
Yes
Usage reporting
  • API
  • Email
  • SMS

Analytics

Infrastructure or application metrics
Yes
Metrics types
  • CPU
  • Disk
  • HTTP request and response status
  • Memory
  • Network
  • Number of active instances
  • Other
Other metrics
  • Availability
  • Running Services
Reporting types
API access

Resellers

Supplier type
Not a reseller

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Conforms to BS7858:2012
Government security clearance
Up to Developed Vetting (DV)

Asset protection

Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
Yes
Data storage and processing locations
United Kingdom
User control over data storage and processing locations
Yes
Datacentre security standards
Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
Penetration testing frequency
At least once a year
Penetration testing approach
‘IT Health Check’ performed by a CHECK service provider
Protecting data at rest
  • Physical access control, complying with CSA CCM v3.0
  • Encryption of all physical media
Data sanitisation process
Yes
Data sanitisation type
Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
Equipment disposal approach
Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Backup and recovery

Backup and recovery
Yes
Backup controls
Backups are configured to the customers requirements via the service desk.
Datacentre setup
Multiple datacentres with disaster recovery
Scheduling backups
Users contact the support team to schedule backups
Backup recovery
Users contact the support team

Data-in-transit protection

Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
  • Private network or public sector network
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
Data protection within supplier network
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
  • Other
Other protection within supplier network
A virtual private network is created for each customer. This is logically isolated from other networks and each are controlled by a firewall for security.

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
6DG offer a 99.99% availability SLA on all components up to the OS.
Approach to resilience
All components have been built in fully resilient pairs. With fully resilient networking links between all components and to external third parties, including multiple ISPs. For host availability SDG use VMware’s HA failover for redundancy.
Outage reporting
All infrastructure is monitored on the network 24/7. Should there be an outage monitoring alerts are sent to the Public Sector operations team via e-mail and SMS.

Identity and authentication

User authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Limited access network (for example PSN)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Other
Other user authentication
2+1 factor authentication using a certificate, token and password to access the Public Sector VPN which is required to reach the vCloud Service. API is additional protected with a WAF
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
Only authorised contacts are granted access rights to Public Sector cloud allowing them to connect to the secure VPN to manage their service. The Service Desk for support will only accept requests from authorised contacts. Communication with anybody at 6DG will need to be pre-approved by a known individual in writing. Management of the infrastructure is via dedicated connectivity and out of band of customer data and customer networks
Access restriction testing frequency
At least once a year
Management access authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Other
Devices users manage the service through
Any device but through a bastion host (a bastion host is a server that provides access to a private network from an external network such as the internet)

Audit information for users

Access to user activity audit information
Users have access to real-time audit information
How long user audit data is stored for
User-defined
Access to supplier activity audit information
Users contact the support team to get audit information
How long supplier audit data is stored for
At least 12 months
How long system logs are stored for
At least 12 months

Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
Yes
Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
LRQA
ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
19/11/2015 – last surveillance visit from LRQA: 22/03/2018
What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
N/A
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
No
Other security certifications
Yes
Any other security certifications
  • PSN Compliance Certified
  • Cyber Essentials

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
Yes
Security governance standards
  • ISO/IEC 27001
  • Other
Other security governance standards
ISO 27001-2013, Cyber Essentials, PSN
Information security policies and processes
All ISO 27001:2013 controls and associated policies are in place. Enhanced weekly and also quarterly external approved scanning vendor (ASV) vulnerability scanning. Carrenza also comply with our PSN CoCo which is aligned to our security principles that allows us to deliver our customers PSN Secure and Protect.

6DG operate a rolling internal audit programme to ensure continuity of compliance to our various accreditations , as well as internal technical auditing of our systems through the use of various integrity checks. This is ensures that there is always a fully justified and documented Change Request for any modification of our secure systems.

Operational security

Configuration and change management standard
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Configuration and change management approach
All non-standard changes must be pre-authorised by going through a peer, senior and CAB approval process. Standard changes are created in template form and are approved in CAB before being implement into Change controls.
Vulnerability management type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Vulnerability management approach
6DG (Public Sector) run an internal vulnerability test once a week. All reported vulnerabilities that are reported are categorised into priority depending on the severity and a case is logged with the operation team who will fix the vulnerability under the time frames dictated by Public sector patching policy. This conforms to the PCI-DSS standard.
Protective monitoring type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Protective monitoring approach
6DG (public sector) have a protective monitoring system where all logs are centralised and checked on a daily basis for security breaches using several key search filters. Alerts are sent out for high risk activity and are pro-actively responded to by the operations and security teams. This conforms to the PCI-DSS standard.
Incident management type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example, CSA CCM v3.0 or ISO/IEC 27035:2011 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Incident management approach
6DG operate an ITIL aligned incident management process with associated procedures for security related incidents. The process has a clearly defined governance framework, including roles & responsibilities, clear policies and associated KPIs. This process conforms to PCI-DSS.

Secure development

Approach to secure software development best practice
Supplier-defined process

Separation between users

Virtualisation technology used to keep applications and users sharing the same infrastructure apart
Yes
Who implements virtualisation
Supplier
Virtualisation technologies used
VMware
How shared infrastructure is kept separate
The Public Sector cloud is multi tenanted and is logically partitioned between its customers using virtual private networks safe guarded from each other using dedicated firewall partitions. The self-service portal only allows access to the resource that has been granted to that particular customer at login and they cannot see or control other areas.

Energy efficiency

Energy-efficient datacentres
Yes

Pricing

Price
£0.01 a virtual machine an hour
Discount for educational organisations
Yes
Free trial available
Yes
Description of free trial
The free trial version of the Public Sector IaaS is the same as the standard production version. Resource limits and timeframe will be agreed on a case basis.
Link to free trial
N/A - please contact 6DG for a free trial

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.