Unboxed Consulting Ltd

Cloud support, maintenance, and consultancy services

Unboxed provides a series of services to support organisations to design and develop cloud-based digital products through agile, user-centred methodologies to meet user needs and organisational goals.

From early identified problem/idea through to scalable, cloud-based products and platforms, Unboxed can support your organisation throughout the whole process.

Features

• Product management to identify and prioritise future enhancements
• Research, design, prototyping and user testing of potential new features
• Continuous insights from user testing and feedback
• Development of new features, hosting of services (eg FMCASP)
• Monitoring of agreed performance metrics
• Ongoing maintenance and software upgrades
• Second, and third line support
• Major Production Incident (MPI) Process for Severity 1 incidents
• Wider problem management resolution for lower severity issues
• Training and coaching in user-centred design and agile delivery

Benefits

• The support of a highly skilled and experienced team
• Peace of mind: critical support is a phone call away
• Your team can focus on other aspects of the service
• Clarity on what is working well and what needs improving
• Capacity and capability to continuously improve your service
• All the benefits of user-centred design and agile delivery

£3,150 to £6,300 a unit a month

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

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 sales-team@unboxedconsulting.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

478566173767878

Contact

Jo Oliveira
+44 (0)20 7183 4250
sales-team@unboxedconsulting.com

Service scope

• Service constraints: Not applicable
• System requirements: Not applicable

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Email or online ticketing
• Support response times: Target Incident Response Time is the time taken to acknowledge an incident in a non-automated way. It is measured from the time an incident record is created, either by the Customer Help Desk via an email submission (and/or telephone call), until the time that the Customer is advised that their problem has been received and is being addressed. Response times:; ; - Priority 1: 1 hour; - Priority 2: 4 hours; - Priority 3: 4 hours
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: No
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 24 hours, 7 days a week
• Web chat support: Web chat
• Web chat support availability: 24 hours, 7 days a week
• Web chat support accessibility standard: WCAG 2.1 AA or EN 301 549
• Web chat accessibility testing: Untested but stated on Slack website
• Onsite support: Yes, at extra cost
• Support levels: We provide Priority 1 (P1), Priority 2 (P2) and Priority 3 (P3) support levels. Our managed support services cost £6,300 per month for 24/7 support or £3,150 per month for office-hours support.; ; - P1: Total non-availability of the Supported Software. Faults with the Supported Software or a significant functional component of the Supported Software which render the software materially unusable for a core element of its intended business use, or which introduces a significant and urgent risk to the Customer in terms of financial or reputational risk. ; ; - P2: Faults with the Supported Software or a significant functional component of the Supported Software which do not render the software materially unusable for a core element of its intended business use, and which introduce a material level of financial or reputational risk such that it would be unacceptable to delay resolution until a planned maintenance release and for which a business workaround does not exist that would sufficiently mitigate the above risk.; ; - P3: Faults with the Supported Software which are sufficiently minor or which have an effective workaround such that it would be acceptable to schedule them into a planned maintenance release or defer fix to an unspecified future date.
• Support available to third parties: Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

• Getting started: Ahead of providing ongoing support for your cloud product, we will work with you to understand your users, stakeholders, product, constraints and strategy. This takes the form of a consultative project in which we form strong relationships with your key staff involved in the service and build a deep knowledge of your cloud architecture plus product suite to be supported.; ; We provide second and third line support for your nominated cloud applications, once onboarded to our support team, your nominated staff will have access to our emergency support number in the event of P1 or P2 incidents.
• Service documentation: No
• End-of-contract data extraction: Ownership and hosting of your cloud applications stays with you. When the contract ends, Unboxed will no longer provide second and third tier support.
• End-of-contract process: For the initial part of the contract, working closely with you to understand and shape your cloud architecture, products and strategy, we charge for our team on a day rate.; ; When support for the nominated service starts, there is a monthly retainer of £6,300 or £3,150 per month depending on whether you opt for 24 hour 7 day a week support or business hours only support.; ; When the contract ends, there are no additional costs, Unboxed will simply cease supporting your products. Hosting will remain with you.; ; In the event that you have requested that Unboxed host your products, there will need to be a separate project to transfer hosting to your next supplier, charged on a day rate basis. Or hosting and support could simply be terminated.

Using the service

• Web browser interface: No
• API: No
• Command line interface: No

Scaling

• Scaling available: Yes
• Scaling type: Automatic
• Independence of resources: The service is implemented using a scalable technical architecture on AWS.
• Usage notifications: No

Analytics

• Infrastructure or application metrics: Yes
• Metrics types:
  • CPU
  • Disk
  • HTTP request and response status
  • Memory
  • Network
  • Number of active instances
• Reporting types: Reports on request

Resellers

• Supplier type: Not a reseller

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Conforms to BS7858:2019
• Government security clearance: Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Asset protection

• Knowledge of data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Data storage and processing locations:
  • United Kingdom
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
  • Other locations
• 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: Less than once a year
• Penetration testing approach: Another external penetration testing organisation
• Protecting data at rest: Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
• 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
• What’s backed up: Bespoke AWS back-up strategy implemented as part of initial project.
• Backup controls: During the initial project and onboarding, we will work with you to understand your current AWS back-up strategy and how it needs to be optimised. We will then implement it on your behalf. This will be at the correct level of granularity to fit your organisational and product requirements.
• Datacentre setup: Multiple datacentres with disaster recovery
• Scheduling backups: Supplier controls the whole backup schedule
• Backup recovery: Users contact the support team

Data-in-transit protection

• Data protection between buyer and supplier networks:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • Other
• Other protection between networks: SSH for remote console access.
• Data protection within supplier network:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • Other
• Other protection within supplier network: SSH for remote console access.

Availability and resilience

• Guaranteed availability: Your products/services will be hosted on AWS and availability, aside from scheduled maintenance of the product, mirrors that of AWS.; ; Unboxed’s support service assists in the event of high priority issues. The first hour is included as part of the monthly retainer, subsequently remediation is charged at £170/hour.
• Approach to resilience: Apps are built with a combination of automated test suites and manual user acceptance testing. Code is written to NCSC secure development principles and includes automated testing against OWASP identified security risks. App development framework (Ruby on Rails) provides automatic protection against CSRF, XSS and SQL injection attacks.; ; App environments are built using IaC ensuring reproducibility and rapid reconstruction. Apps use managed services for things like cache, databases, etc. which provide automated management of updates and backups. Managed database service (AWS RDS) has both failover and point-in-time recovery - the latter provides the ability to recover lost data should accidental deletion occur.; ; Apps are deployed in an autoscaling configuration that allows increasing the number of servers rapidly in response to a change in demand. Apps are fronted by load balancers and CDNs with WAF configurations that allow blocking/rate limiting of requests by ip address and addition of extra rules to combat emerging threats; ; Apps use a variety of monitoring tools like Appsignal and CloudWatch alarms to proactively alert us to errors and performance problems. Apps also include custom monitoring for exceptional events such as fraud detection.; ; AWS data centers use redundancy, failover, and geographic diversity.
• Outage reporting: Your products will be integrated with AppSignal which sends phone and email alerts using Pager Duty in the event of an outage, relevant parties are notified.

Identity and authentication

• User authentication: Other
• Other user authentication: Dependent on your requirements
• Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels: This will be customised to suit your organisational requirements.
• Access restriction testing frequency: At least once a year
• Management access authentication:
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Identity federation with existing provider (for example Google Apps)
  • Limited access network (for example PSN)
  • Username or password
• 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 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: No
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: Yes
• Cyber essentials plus: Yes
• Other security certifications: No

Security governance

• Named board-level person responsible for service security: Yes
• Security governance certified: Yes
• Security governance standards: Other
• Other security governance standards: Cyber Essentials Plus
• Information security policies and processes: Directors and the CTO are responsible for Information Security. All Unboxed staff report to them in this area and comply with a Cyber Essentials Plus certified policy. Policies are enforced through training, spot-checks and device management software.

Operational security

• Configuration and change management standard: Supplier-defined controls
• Configuration and change management approach: Apps environments are built using IaC and stored in GitHub along with the source code of the application. Any changes to either the configuration or source code is raised using a pull request which is then peer reviewed (including security assessment) before being merged. The management of this process is done via the Trello kanban tool. Apps have a staging/preview environment where changes can be tested for user acceptance before being deployed to the live environment.
• Vulnerability management type: Supplier-defined controls
• Vulnerability management approach: App source code repositories are configured to automatically create pull requests should a CVE security alert be published for a dependency. These pull requests are then expedited through the change management process depending on the vulnerability score and whether the application is affected by the specific mechanism in the CVE.; Servers are configured to apply updates automatically and send Slack notifications if an update requires the server to be restarted. Servers are regularly refreshed to use the latest system images so that minimal updates are required when scaling.
• Protective monitoring type: Supplier-defined controls
• Protective monitoring approach: Apps use a combination of monitoring tools such as Appsignal and CloudWatch to alert should we see elevated error rates, individual exceptions or performance problems such as external APIs being slow to respond or returning errors. Servers are also configured to log all commands to external services which prevents tampering and remote access is notified externally to Slack where it can be challenged and confirmed. Apps also have internal custom monitoring to alert to suspicious patterns of behaviour. Response to P1 issues is within an hour, the type of response is dependent on the issue.
• Incident management type: Supplier-defined controls
• Incident management approach: Once your product is live, we provide second and third line support. We have a dedicated team trained in resolving common issues, progress on which is fed back on an hourly basis. Nominated individuals within your organisation report a P1 or P2 issue using our dedicated support phone number, after they have performed initial triage. Once the incident has been resolved, Unboxed will provide an incident report.

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: Other
• Other virtualisation technology used: Public Cloud (AWS)
• How shared infrastructure is kept separate: Applications are deployed to single use Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) configurations in separate AWS accounts and are not shared between organisations.

Energy efficiency

• Energy-efficient datacentres: Yes
• Description of energy efficient datacentres: AWS data centres adhere to the EU Code of Conduct for Energy Efficient Data Centres by maximising energy efficiency and minimising environmental impact. They utilise advanced cooling systems and energy-efficient hardware, striving for 100% renewable energy usage. Innovative cooling techniques, such as ambient air cooling, reduce reliance on traditional air conditioning, enhancing energy conservation. Additionally, they optimise resource use in data centre designs and continuously adopt best practices for operation. These efforts align with the Code's emphasis on sustainable energy sources and efficient data centre management, demonstrating a commitment to energy-efficient and environmentally responsible operations.

Social Value

• Social Value:

  Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Covid-19 recovery
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

  Fighting climate change

  Unboxed is working across a wide range of areas to combat climate change, from small incremental changes within our office processes to larger, national level activities. We are committed to minimising our environmental footprint and supporting the UK Government’s sustainability goals. ; ; Activities include:; ; Creating Char.gy (https://char.gy/), an electric vehicle lamppost chargepoint solution and digital application, supporting the end-to-end EV charging experience, and uptake of EVs in residential areas through on-street charge points, using 100% renewable energy; ; Supporting local green initiatives - in 2022, we ran a campaign to help young aspiring football players reduce their use of single-use plastic. #PlayersAgainstPlastic encourages players to think about how they can take small steps to improve their impact on the environment.; Raising money for charity - in 2022, we joined Ride the Change, a 225 mile cycle tour raising awareness about positive climate solutions and connecting with our local like-minded community; ; Providing teams to work with other organisations (e.g. Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) on projects that are working towards fighting climate change; ; Using a green energy company to provide all of our office electricity; ; Providing a ‘Cycle to Work’ scheme to support employees with an alternative to private and public transport, and reduce personal carbon footprints; ; Zero waste to landfill - we work with First Mile to fulfil our zero waste to landfill commitment. This involves being careful about the choices we make when it comes to office supplies, thoughtfully selecting our materials and suppliers to make it easy for our team to reduce energy use.; ; Giving unused equipment a second life - we use Freecycle to give away any office equipment and furniture we no longer need. We’re also committed to fixing and refurbishing phones and laptops for our team members, rather than buying new ones.

  Covid-19 recovery

  Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, we continue to adapt and iterate our working processes to support our employees and customers, and meet government guidance.; ; Activities to support Covid-19 recovery include:; ; Prioritising engagement with local community groups affected by the pandemic, ensuring their voices shape our design and development practices. Through workshops, we empower community members to actively participate in the design process, fostering inclusion; ; Providing a hybrid working environment to all employees, enabling people to work from a combination of our office, their home, on-site, and from other locations (e.g. working spaces); ; Creating opportunities for fully-remote employment; ; Ensuring the wellbeing of employees who may need to shield through additional support channels; ; Giving employees the flexibility to decide when, and how often they would like to work from our office; ; Supporting our customers with hybrid working practices, working with them to decide the best appropriate cloud-based communication tools and systems to collaborate, and support our work; ; Developing skills and building capabilities by working with individuals from underprivileged backgrounds, providing expertise in user experience design and digital innovation.

  Tackling economic inequality

  Unboxed has a track record of providing tangible opportunities to support new businesses, jobs, and skills through a variety of channels.; ; Activities include:; ; Job and skills training - partnering with local organisations and educational institutions, Unboxed team is consistently involved in local programmes that provide training, mentoring and coaching specifically targeting communities facing economic challenges. These programs will equip participants with in-demand skills relevant to the healthcare technology sector, such as user experience design, service design and coding, thereby enhancing their employability and facilitating upward mobility. Some of these programmes include: Rails Girls London, BeMe Mentoring, Tutorfair (underprivileged kids in coding), Young Green Britain Challenge, Codebar, Service design network UK; ; Upskilling within organisations that we’re working with “on the job” in agile, user-centred and digital skills through one-to-one working, pairing, coaching, mentoring, running workshops, and other methods to build sustainable in-house teams, skills, and capabilities; ; Always considering digital inclusion and accessibility - we ensure our work prioritises accessibility, providing guidance and resources to bridge the digital divide for vulnerable populations. Partnering with local authorities through our project work, we promote digital inclusion and reduce health disparities.; ; Creating and running an in-house development bootcamp (“Unbootcamp”) to support cohorts of individuals from non-development backgrounds into development roles through a structured, hands-on, and supportive programme; ; Regularly organising and running Techqala (https://www.techqala.com/), a Cape Town-based startup accelerator/business innovation camp/team-bonding experience, created to bring together local South African startups (with complimentary places), and international corporate innovators for a week of learning and creative business thinking

  Equal opportunity

  Unboxed is committed to equal opportunity for employees, partners, and the wider community. We actively address the disability employment gap and promote a diverse, inclusive workplace where all can thrive. We understand the importance of building a diverse, inclusive team, recognising that this directly improves the quality of insights delivered through our work.; ; Activities include:; ; Supporting students by providing ‘on the job’ work experience, enabling them to gain hands-on experience by joining our project teams for periods of time (e.g. ‘My Year 11 work experience with Unboxed’: https://unboxed.co/blog/my-year-11-work-experience-with-unboxed/) and ‘Working with Unboxed’ https://unboxed.co/blog/leyarnis-work-experience/); ; Working with apprentices through joining our project teams, and collaborating on a day-to-day basis to upskill in-house teams, and build internal capabilities through one-to-one working, pairing, coaching, and other techniques; ; Ensuring our culture, the way we promote ourselves, and the recruitment process, are all focused on increasing the diversity of the organisation. One result is that the company has shifted from being very male dominated, as is typical in the tech sector, to being over 50% female including senior technical roles.; ; Holding ongoing inclusion training with external facilitators for our employees, covering areas including inclusion within our recruitment processes, intent and impact, psychological safety, and how you want to be treated in the workplace; ; Successfully shifting our organisational demographics to be over 50% female, including senior technical roles, challenging the male-dominated norms prevalent in the tech sector. We conduct ongoing inclusion training facilitated by internal wellbeing experts to educate our employees on topics such as kindness at work, psychological safety, and creating inclusive work environments.

  Wellbeing

  Unboxed is actively working to maintain an inclusive workplace with a culture and environment that strives to promote the wellbeing of our people so that everyone has a sense of belonging and feels involved, empowered to do their best, and be successful.; ; We work hard to maintain our culture of openness through promoting a positive work-life balance, remaining open in communication, creating positive working relationships, and encouraging diversity of thought and behaviour.; ; Activities include:; ; Employing a dedicated wellbeing and people role to provide wellbeing support to our whole team; ; Facilitating monthly wellbeing drop-in sessions across a variety of mental and physical wellbeing topics, including how to listen well, gratitude, and more, to support people with communication, and managing relationships; ; Holding third-party mental health awareness workplace training courses, with topics including intent and impact, and signs and symptoms of wellbeing issues, to support our employees; ; Monthly one-to-one personal reflection sessions, as a way for each employee to reflect on, and progress their personal and career development; ; A wellbeing Slack channel to share articles, resources, tips, and other content as additional support; Regularly writing, and publishing blog posts to share what we’re experiencing and learning with the wider world (e.g. ‘Supporting the wellbeing of a remote digital team’: https://unboxed.co/blog/supporting-the-wellbeing-of-a-remote-digital-team/)

Pricing

• Price: £3,150 to £6,300 a unit a month
• Discount for educational organisations: No
• Free trial available: No

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

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 sales-team@unboxedconsulting.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.