Pulsant and Nine23 offer sovereign service for UK govt, regulated sectors

Capitalizing on the new interest in sovereign cloud, UK datacenter biz Pulsant has teamed up with Nine23, a firm specializing in high-assurance managed services for users such as the government, law enforcement, and defense sectors.

Pulsant operates a group of 14 bit barns spread across the UK, connected by a private network. The firm says this infrastructure offers a suitable platform from which Nine23 can deliver its secure services to customers that operate in highly regulated industries.

"Nine23 is addressing the need to increase resilience in critical services delivered into the public sector, which will be required under the new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSR)," chief exec Steve Jewell told The Register.

The firm, which was founded by a British armed forces veteran, claims it is reducing its dependence on single suppliers and increasing geographic separation of its services by making use of Pulsant's facilities and its edge network. 

"Pulsant is one of the only true UK sovereign providers that is investing in the facilities and services needed to meet the high assurance needs of our customers," Jewell said.

Nine23 provides managed IT services such as virtual desktops, secure remote working, business continuity and disaster recovery, as well as cyber resilience advice, assurance services, and the Platform FLEX sovereign cloud. It claims to be a fully UK-owned and operated company, with all staff, solutions, and infrastructure located within the country.

As for Pulsant, director of Partners and Ecosystems Wendy Shearer said the company sees "huge growth in demand for sovereign infrastructure," and said the new partnership means that Nine23 can take advantage of Pulsant's investment in secure UK platforms to accelerate its own growth.

"Nine23 is a fantastic addition to our diverse partner ecosystem, bringing unparalleled expertise in the high assurance space. I'm confident that their products and solutions will be of value not just to its clients in the defence, UK government, and regulated markets, but to other partners in our ecosystem," she added.

Sovereign cloud has risen up the list of concerns for many organizations on this side of the Atlantic since the erratic Trump administration came into office, with many fearing that their data is no longer safe with the US-owned clouds that dominate the market.

That sentiment has seen giants such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google rushing to try to reassure customers that their data is safe and to improve their sovereign services in the region.

Microsoft said it would expand its European datacenter footprint and the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty services. Google introduced an air-gapped solution for customers with strict data security and residency requirements. AWS promised a new European organization with a locally controlled parent company as part of its European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) rollout. Just yesterday, Microsoft said it would offer an on-prem version of its 365 productivity suite as part of a move to satisfy European regulations and offer customers the chance to run the service "in environments they fully control."

The concern among European cloud players is that under the US CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act, signed into law by Donald Trump during his first presidency in 2018, American authorities could compel cloud providers to hand over data – even if the bits are stored on UK or EU servers.

• AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0
• Unhappy with the cloud costs? You're not alone
• 'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers
• Google carves out cloudy safe spaces for nations nervous about America's reach

Britain had a locally owned and operated cloud provider, UKCloud, until it was went into liquidation in 2022. The biz served a number of central and local government departments, the police, the Ministry of Defence, the NHS, the University of Manchester, and more as clients.

But its business dried up as the cloud giants absorbed many government sector contracts – a situation that sparked an investigation into the local cloud market by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is to give its final decision later this year. ®