Cabinet Office awards UKFast £1 million contract for ResilienceDirect

Funded by the Cabinet Office since 2014, ResilienceDirect enables the police service, the Fire and Rescue Service, the ambulance service, local authorities, utilities organisations, Shopping Centres, arenas, Search and Rescue and the UK’s Coast Guard services to securely share information, training advice and Best Practice when responding to incidents.

As of last month, ResilienceDirect now has 87,550 end users. It’s available, in fact, to all Category 1/2 responders, Government departments, voluntary sector and resilience communities and, in operation, enables multi-agency collaboration and situational awareness through data visualisation and real-time information sharing.

The platform has been employed to co-ordinate 7,620 live responses to date, including for the G7 Summit, unexploded WWII bombs in Exeter and Goole, flooding episodes and a collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With more and more people accessing the platform – and in the wake of an increase in cyber attacks across recent years – it follows that maintaining the security and integrity of ResilienceDirect is an absolutely top priority.

UKFast is at the heart of this effort, affording ResilienceDirect and its resilience communities reassurance that sensitive information always remains secure. Operating fully owned and police-assured UK Data Centres as well as a UK-based disaster recovery site, UKFast is able to fulfil the highest availability Service Level Agreement of 99.999% and, indeed, go over and above that threshold in making certain that there’s never an outage.

As a result of the contract award, UKFast will now continue to host, support and manage the infrastructure underpinning ResilienceDirect, monitoring the platform 24/7/365 to ensure continuous availability with no downtime.

Delivering for the public good

Luana Avagliano, head of ResilienceDirect, informed Security Matters: “The mission of ResilienceDirect is to save lives and keep the UK safe. The partnership with UKFast is helping us to achieve that aim as the team regularly goes above and beyond the Call of Duty. The team members from UKFast are always there when we need support. This is not just a contract. It’s about the public good and giving back to the community. UKFast really understands that.”

On an average day, ResilienceDirect might have 300 concurrent users online, but this number could quickly escalate to 10,000 during a major national incident. UKFast’s VMware cloud solution has the capacity to scale up at a moment’s notice so there’s no chance of delays or lags during an emergency.

Stephen Jewell, director of the public sector at UKFast, explained: “We understand the impact ResilienceDirect has for our Emergency Services workers. Being awarded this new contract is acknowledgement of the trust ResilienceDirect places in what we do. At the very highest level, we’re committed to evolving the platform to ensure that Britain’s Emergency Services continue to have the best tools available for keeping us all safe and protected.”

With over 5,000 customers across sectors such as e-commerce, financial services, software, technology and professional services, UKFast delivers secure cloud-led digital transformation and managed solutions.

The company’s rapidly growing public sector business is an approved supplier across all three sections of the Government’s Digital Marketplace: G-Cloud 12, the Crown Commercial Service Framework for Cloud Services and the Health and Social Care Network.

At present, UKFast serves customers in the defence, central and local Government, education, policing and healthcare sectors.

*Further information is available online at www.ukfast.co.uk

**UKFast is exhibiting at The Emergency Services Show 2021, which runs at the NEC in Birmingham from 7-9 September. Attendees should visit Stand A59