Managed UK Cloud (Enterprise Compute Cloud )
Datapipe delivers managed access to UKCloud platforms and services, providing public sector organisations with on-demand, scalable compute, storage and network resources to deliver transformational projects.
Datapipe’s services are straightforward and flexible, building on a range of UKCloud solutions with smart customisation options that deliver customer requirements as cost-effectively as possible.
Features
- On demand - Billed by the hour for resources used
- Aligned to your applications and workloads
- A range of service levels, VM sizes and licencing options
- Strong support for database environments
- Platform spans two UK data centres separated by over 100km
- Cross-domain functionality: controlled access between Internet and Elevated domains
- Assured; UK hosted by SC and NPPV cleared personnel
- Aligned with NCSC Cloud Security Principles
- Connect over the PSN, PNN or RLI
- Based on enterprise grade systems from VMware, Cisco and EMC
Benefits
- Enable cost savings by controlling VM power states
- Access the skilled resources you need, when you need them
- Use Datapipe support to get the best from your applications
- Align your organisational requirements with your IT spend
- Architect solutions with confidence that applications and services remain available
- Create compelling citizen facing services, whilst ensuring data remains safe
- Strengthen your access and authorisation capabilities
- Choose cloud solutions aligned with NCSC best practice
- Access a range of connectivity options
- Use known technologies to de-risk your cloud transition
Pricing
£0.01 a virtual machine an hour
- Free trial available
Service documents
Request an accessible format
Framework
G-Cloud 9
Service ID
9 2 3 0 7 4 9 0 5 0 0 1 2 9 5
Contact
Datapipe
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Telephone: <removed>
Email: <removed>@b8f7fe78-89c6-477f-8c3b-ab260b893258.com
Service scope
- Service constraints
-
Management up to and including the OS is mandatory. Management up to the hypervisor only is not permitted.
Customers must prove compliance with the access requirements of private networks.
Planned maintenance windows are identified in the service description.
Emergency maintenance windows are identified in the service description. - System requirements
-
- Windows or Linux virtual machines only
- Standard connectivity via site to site IPSec VPN
- Modern browsers supporting flash and allows downloading of JAVA applets
User support
- Email or online ticketing support
- Email or online ticketing
- Support response times
-
Priority One incidents are responded to within 10 minutes of the incident being logged, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Incidents are logged either by phone, email or the automated monitoring of infrastructure and applications.
Full details of the service response targets for incidents, changes and requests can be found in the terms and conditions. - User can manage status and priority of support tickets
- Yes
- Online ticketing support accessibility
- None or don’t know
- Phone support
- Yes
- Phone support availability
- 24 hours, 7 days a week
- Web chat support
- No
- Onsite support
- No
- Support levels
-
Datapipe's support model is all-inclusive and untiered. We offer the same level of service to every Dataipe customer. Our core customer engagement principle is to be ‘Easy to Work With’. This culture is most visible in our Operations Centre, where specialist teams work closely together with a shared understanding of our customer’s drivers and their required outcomes.
This is achieved by the following alignment structure:
> Account Team (Lead): Our Planners and Thinkers
• This team is responsible for understanding and communicating the required customer outcomes to the rest of the Datapipe business and is accountable for maintaining the partnership between the customer and Datapipe.
> Service: Our Deliverers and Analysts
• This team is responsible for managing the delivery of customer outcomes that have been set during the discovery, analysis and design phases. The service team are responsible for ensuring the customer's sevice experience meets expectations throughout live service.
> Operations: Our Engineers and Explorers
• This team is responsible for maintaining and accelerating the delivery of our customer outcomes through deep technical specialisms combined with a thorough understanding of the customer's business. - Support available to third parties
- Yes
Onboarding and offboarding
- Getting started
-
Getting Started: personal support from your assigned Service Delivery Manager, full user documentation and end user portal enrolment.
Datapipe has years of experience on-boarding customers into our virtual and cloud infrastructure environments. We will walk you through all considerations (typically including network connectivity and migration options) as your requirements develop, ensuring we balance risk vs cost vs timescales in the right way for your organisation.
Datapipe’s proven, expert service management delivers a single point of contact for your teams. Our Service Delivery Managers are responsible for the successful onboarding and running of your services and create custom engagement schedules for review and discussion. Your Service Delivery Manager (SDM) will also collaborate with you to create a custom runbook, which clearly lays out all information, contacts and processes relating to the daily management of your environments.
Your SDM will also provide one-on-one training to ensure a high level of comfort and familiarity with our interfaces and portals. This can be achieved over a webex for large distributed groups of end users or at your premises, depending on your preference. - Service documentation
- Yes
- Documentation formats
- End-of-contract data extraction
-
Users can extract their data across the network via VPN or other secure network protocol. Snapshots of virtual machine images can be provided if required which can then be transferred across a secure link.
In the event you require a live migration of virtual machines or database data, replication services may be configured, subject to analysis by Datapipe, which may incur additional costs.
Design and service documentation is located on the Datapipe portal and can be downloaded to provide a permanent record. Other documentation, where available or feasible to produce, can be provided on request. - End-of-contract process
-
If you feel the need to switch providers, we will work with you to expedite the off-boarding of your services to another environment. Datapipe’s solutions are all based on standardised infrastructure and software, with robust migration processes and consistent documentation that make knowledge transfer straightforward and complete.
As standard, Datapipe will provide secure access to third parties to extract your data and application configurations to help you get applications up and running in the target environment. In the event you require a live migration of virtual machines, and assuming the target is supported by the replication software, additional replication services may be available at an additional cost.
Depending on your target end state and specific schedule, there may be additional professional services charges applicable to help ensure that the migration and cutover of services to the new provider are aligned precisely to your requirements.
Using the service
- Web browser interface
- Yes
- Using the web interface
-
Users can create and manage incidents, changes and requests through the Datapipe portal.
Customer documentation is stored on the portal, allowing customers to view service reports, design documentation and invoices.
Customers can create and remove users of the portal for their organisation and adjust the type of user account they have.
Datapipe can provide access to the UKCloud portal delivering enhanced functionality through a control panel allowing users to provision, manage and decommission various aspects of this service. It also allows users to interface with the UKCloud service management system including raising tickets and requests. The web interface also provides access to a comprehensive set of documentation and videos. Launch, manage and delete virtual network, compute and storage resources. Display network topology. Manage images including creation and recover of backups. Control access and security including key pairs, API access and floating IPs. Manage load balancers. - Web interface accessibility standard
- WCAG 2.0 AAA
- Web interface accessibility testing
- No specific web interface technology testing has been undertaken with assistive technology users, however good practice development methods have been used to optimise the end user experience.
- API
- Yes
- What users can and can't do using the API
- You can use API calls to create, manage and monitor Service Requests and view information about the components of your environment. Datapipe can provide native access to underlying APIs such as vCloud and OpenStack. These are compatible with tools such as Terraform and platforms such as AWS S3.
- API automation tools
-
- Ansible
- Chef
- Terraform
- Puppet
- API documentation
- No
- Command line interface
- No
Scaling
- Scaling available
- Yes
- Scaling type
-
- Automatic
- Manual
- Independence of resources
- In order to guarantee that users are not affected by the demands from other users, Datapipe architects the UKCloud solution in line with the requirements of your application and users. We also have the ability to use resource reservations and shares such as internet bandwidth shaping. In addition, the Datapipe capacity planning team will work closely with the UKCloud capacity team to ensure that usage in terms of all resources are constantly monitored and increased accordingly relating to user demand.
- Usage notifications
- Yes
- Usage reporting
-
- Other
Analytics
- Infrastructure or application metrics
- Yes
- Metrics types
-
- CPU
- Disk
- HTTP request and response status
- Memory
- Network
- Number of active instances
- Other
- Other metrics
-
- Database connections
- Database memory
- Standard Service monitoring (started/stopped)
- Standard process monitoring
- Custom infrastructure metrics (where feasible)
- Custom application metrics (where feasible)
- Reporting types
-
- Real-time dashboards
- Regular reports
- Reports on request
Resellers
- Supplier type
- Reseller providing extra features and support
- Organisation whose services are being resold
- UKCloud
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 every 6 months
- 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
- Data sanitisation process
- Yes
- Data sanitisation type
-
- Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
- Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
- Hardware containing data is completely destroyed
- 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
- What’s backed up
-
- Virtual Machine Images
- Databases
- Backup controls
-
Backup schedules and file or folder inclusions/exclusions are agreed with the customer at the point of contract and an appropriate schedule is documented and implemented as part of the onboarding process. If the customer requirements change, a ticket can be logged to amend the schedule. The appropriate customer documentation will also be updated.
Backup success is reported on a regular basis in the Service Reports provided to the customer. Any backup failures are retried the next day and failure records are reported to the customer. - Datacentre setup
-
- Multiple datacentres with disaster recovery
- Multiple datacentres
- 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
- Bonded fibre optic connections
- Data protection within supplier network
- IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
Availability and resilience
- Guaranteed availability
- 99.95%
- Approach to resilience
- The service is deployed across a number of sites, regions and zones. Each zone is designed to eliminate single points of failure (such as power, network and hardware). Datapipe will work with customers to implement solutions with the appropriate resilience, which will mean their workloads spans multiple sites, regions or zones to ensure service continuity should a failure occur.
- Outage reporting
-
The Datapipe portal details scheduled maintenance, outages and incidents affecting multiple customers.
In the event of an incident, nominated contacts for each customer, as documented in the operational run book, are notified and updated at least every 60 minutes of the progress towards resolution of the issue.
Technical Escalation Managers are also deployed onto customer incidents depending on severity, who take ownership of resolution outcomes and provide a central point of contact for all comms.
Identity and authentication
- User authentication
-
- 2-factor authentication
- Limited access network (for example PSN)
- Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
- Access is limited via a secure two -factor authentication method, using 'least privilege' access to systems. Customers can log tickets via email or telephone and all initial interactions are security validated against a list of known email addresses, persons, telephone numbers and security information. Datapipe performs all management through Secure Management Environments (SME). This is a walled garden approach to customer identity management. An engineer must first provide a username & FIPS 104-2 compliant one time password (OTP) combination, then valid active directory password associated with the users lowest level account. All customers can use their own authentication source.
- Access restriction testing frequency
- At least once a year
- Management access authentication
-
- 2-factor authentication
- Dedicated link (for example VPN)
- Username or password
- Devices users manage the service through
-
- Dedicated device on a segregated network (providers own provision)
- Dedicated device on a government network (for example PSN)
- Dedicated device over multiple services or networks
- 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 contact the support team to get audit information
- How long user audit data is stored for
- At least 12 months
- 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
- SNR Certification, Certification No.: SNR 11399498/15/I
- ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
- 20 October 2016, Renew Date: 05 October 2018
- What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
- Anything above the Hypervisor is not covered by the Datapipe ISMS. Datapipe use a shared security model to ensure all parties are aware of their responsibilities and agree how to manage risk.
- ISO 28000:2007 certification
- No
- CSA STAR certification
- No
- PCI certification
- Yes
- Who accredited the PCI DSS certification
- NTT Security Ltd, Certificate ID: o4Anq6RuYfK2dN1
- PCI DSS accreditation date
- 15 September 2016, Renew Date: 15 September 2017
- What the PCI DSS doesn’t cover
- As per industry best practice, our PCI scope is restricted to specific platforms. Any platform that is not in the Datapipe PCI scope is not covered by this certification. For Platforms in scope anything above the Hypervisor is not covered by the Datapipe PCI scope. Datapipe uses a shared security model to ensure all parties are aware of the scope of accreditations, their responsibilities and agree how to manage risk.
- Other security accreditations
- Yes
- Any other security accreditations
-
- PSN Code of Connection
- Cyber Essentials Plus
Security governance
- Named board-level person responsible for service security
- Yes
- Security governance accreditation
- Yes
- Security governance standards
-
- ISO/IEC 27001
- Other
- Other security governance standards
- PCI DSS
- Information security policies and processes
-
In order to protect both ourselves and our customers, we have invested in maintaining core security certifications for ISO 9001, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials and PCI DSS 3.2. The Datapipe Executive Team are committed to providing a robust framework that prioritises security across our business. The board have recognised Information Security and Cyber Security are vital to the protection of any organisation’s key assets and supporting the global digital economy. Security risks, requirements and controls are primarily designed around the CIA Triad, which relates to Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.
Managing security in this manner allows for a practical, applicable and cost effective design that meets our business, regulatory and compliance requirements. As we are fully certified in both ISO27001 and PCI we have robust compliant policies that are regularly audited by ourselves. Policy implementation is measured though metrics which are reported quarterly to the board, direction is then communicated to heads of department for rectification.
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
-
Datapipe follow the ITIL definition of change management to provide a standardised method for the management of the risk and impact associated with amending live configuration items. The process covers both Datapipe and customer configuration items.
Changes are categorised as Standard, Normal or Emergency allowing for appropriate due diligence to be performed. The change team ensure the necessary governance is in place at all stages of the process and are responsible for managing quality, adherence to the process and provide final approval. There is a formal disciplinary process within Datapipe for those who do not follow the change management process. - Vulnerability management type
- Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Vulnerability management approach
- Datapipe Security regularly carry out vulnerability scans using authorised scanning vendors on external interfaces as well as internal scans using Alien Vault SIEM. Results are reviewed and remediation plans set through raising tasks within our management system for engineer completion. We closely monitor multiple vendor websites and receive vendor e-mails for patch releases, vulnerability notification or vendor specific warnings. We are also signed up to NCSC CiSP. Notifications of vulnerabilities are distributed to our relevant teams teams who inform our customers. Datapipe use standard patching timeframes of 30/60/90 but for government customers we aim for critical patches within 14 days.
- Protective monitoring type
- Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Protective monitoring approach
- Datapipe utilises the AlienVault Unified Security Management for our protective monitoring solution on our platforms. USM combines five essential security capabilities, Asset Discovery, Behavioural Monitoring, Vulnerability Assessment, SIEM and Intrusion Detection into a single management plane. Datapipe, through AlienVault USM, has a complete view of our estate ensuring the complete integrity of our systems by identifying potentially compromised systems and suspicious behaviour, assess vulnerabilities, correlate and analyse security event data.
- 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
- Where Datapipe has not acknowledged an issue through proactive monitoring, users can report incidents by phone or email, 24x7, to the service desk. Datapipe follows the ITIL definition of Major Incident prioritisation: Sev 1 Critical - Single Client Total Outage. Sev 2 Major - Single Client Impairment. The Major Incident Management Process is implemented by the Datapipe Operations team with the goal of managing unplanned service interruptions. This includes customer communications (by phone and email) to a defined schedule. The Operations group, specifically the Technical Escalation Manager (TEM) is responsible for initiating and managing the incident reporting process.
Secure development
- Approach to secure software development best practice
- Independent review of processes (for example CESG CPA Build Standard, ISO/IEC 27034, ISO/IEC 27001 or CSA CCM v3.0)
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
- At the compute/storage layer, consumers are separated via robust hypervisor controls based on VMware vSphere technology. This solution has been previously been validated by the NCSC PGA and the implementation is regularly tested via by regular PGA scoped independent IT Security Health Checks conducted by a CHECK service provider.
Energy efficiency
- Energy-efficient datacentres
- Yes
Pricing
- Price
- £0.01 a virtual machine an hour
- Discount for educational organisations
- No
- Free trial available
- Yes
- Description of free trial
-
Datapipe will work with organisations to create custom proof of concept based on mutually agreed criteria.
Typically this would be an MVP to 'prove before you use' which we would limit to 2-4 weeks with clear scope.
Excluded:
Full resilience.
Production applications/ workloads.
Large scale data migrations.
Limited network.
Documents
- Pricing document
- Pricing document
- Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card
- Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card
- Service definition document
- Service definition document
- Terms and conditions document
- Terms and conditions document