DCN March 2017 | Page 6

industry news

UKFast CEO Jones acquires public sector specialist

UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones MBE has announced the acquisition of another cloud and cyber security service provider , Secure Information Assurance ( S-IA ), following the announcement of a £ 2.3m investment to bolster his firm ’ s government data centre space .
S-IA provides secure cloud hosting and cyber security services to the UK Ministry of Defence , the Cabinet Office and a raft of other UK government organisations .
The deal gives UKFast access to IL3 and IL4 / Official-Sensitive accreditations as well as the UK ’ s highest security rated hosting , known as List-X . The move is a further step towards the high-level security services market , just six months after the acquisition of cyber security specialist Pentest by Jones ’ security business Secarma in July 2016 .
Jones said , ‘ This deal has been exactly a year in the making . Acquiring S-IA is a strategic move , not only because of its high profile government clients , but also because of its security product set . They are already delivering accredited services from List-X facilities to a number of clients .
‘ It ’ s a business that ’ s very much on the rise and the deal was an extremely competitive process , but the S-IA management team sees the clear advantage of partnering with UKFast , seeing the instant scalability of our eCloud platform as the perfect offering for the government .’
UKFast founder and CEO Lawrence Jones MBE ( centre ), with S-IA CEO Martin Knapp and technical director Steve Jewell

Research reveals that 86 per cent of the channel finds white labelled services important in deciding whose cloud services to resell

The ability to white label cloud services is increasingly important for the IT channel when determining which vendors to work with , according to a major market research project from the Cloud Industry Forum ( CIF ). However , CIF has warned that while white labelling enables resellers to protect their brands and maintain control of the customer relationship , resale arrangements must remain transparent to ensure customers are fully aware of what they are buying .
The research , conducted by Vanson Bourne in 2016 on behalf of CIF , polled 150 senior decision makers from IT channel organisations ( MSPs , technical VARs and Systems Integrators ) regarding their attitudes and confidence in reselling cloud services . It found that the ability to white-label services is a key issue for the channel today . While the proportion deeming whitelabelling as important has remained the same since the last time the research was conducted in 2012 ( 86 per cent ), there has been a 20 percentage point increase in organisations that see white labelling as either critical or very important .
According to CIF , it is critical that white labelling arrangements are matched by a commitment to transparency in the supply chain and it is clear from the research that that transparency is lacking in many cases . Just a third ( 31 per cent ) of organisations proactively inform their customers about the third parties involved in the delivery of all of their services , with the remainder offering only a partial view or , in three per cent of cases , no view at all .
Alex Hilton , CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum , said , ‘ Many resellers have spent years building their brand and controlling the service that their customers receive , it is understandable that they will want to remain in control of that relationship . This is clearly a part of the business that they are proud of and naturally keen to protect . Therefore , the growing importance from organisations on white labelled services should come as little surprise and vendors that don ’ t offer the ability to white label their services are going to struggle to make much headway with their partner programmes .’
6 | March 2017