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Six Degrees Technology Group Limited

High performance compute & storage

A high performance self-service IaaS, that supports transactional and demanding requirements, such as ecommerce, ticketing, registration and other demanding high transactional systems. Available as standard on the Six Degrees OFFICAL and Commercial clouds we can offer SLA backed guarantees to over 100,000 IOPS if required.

Features

  • Aligned with NCSC Cloud Security Principles
  • Infrastructure and application automation using infrastructure as code principals
  • Granular resource based hourly billing
  • Secure N+1 UK data centres. Data never leaves the UK
  • Choice of virtual and bare metal physical resource
  • ITIL based service delivery management and reporting
  • 24x7x365 availability, service desk, support, monitoring. 99.99% SLA/ availability guarantee
  • 99.99% SLA / uptime guarantee
  • Guaranteed IOPS
  • Connect via internet, PSN Assured or PSN Protect

Benefits

  • Highly secure for OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE data workloads
  • Ideal for both test & development and production environments
  • Ideal for demanding transactional systems, supporting over 100,000 IOPS
  • Supports any application that runs on x86 architecture
  • Automation and orchestration to simplify processes and reduce cost
  • Rapidly deploy and scale servers and storage resource
  • Easy to use. Self service portal & API. Supports containers
  • Automate the deployment and installation applications
  • Supports containers (Docker, Swarm) and VMware vCloud, OVM and OpenStack
  • Guaranteed IO

Pricing

£0.01 a virtual machine an hour

  • Education pricing available
  • Free trial available

Service documents

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 Publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

5 0 3 8 0 6 3 6 3 8 0 0 2 9 2

Contact

Six Degrees Technology Group Limited Six Degrees' Public Sector team
Telephone: 08000128060
Email: Publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk

Service scope

Service constraints
No
System requirements
  • Requires min. 10 Mbps standard networking (includes reserved bandwidth)
  • X86 operating system and application (non x86 options available)

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
Dependant on incident/request and priority level - please see attached Service Description for details.
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
Yes
Online ticketing support accessibility
WCAG 2.1 A
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
24 hours, 7 days a week
Web chat support
No
Onsite support
Yes, at extra cost
Support levels
Please see attached Service Description for support levels.
Support available to third parties
Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

Getting started
Our services are simple to consume requiring only a browser (and in the case of VMware vCloud a small plug in to be installed). New customers are asked to provide a list of authorised contacts and permission levels with whom we can engage. Those nominated individuals are provided with documentation and if need-be training on how to contact us for support, how to access the ticketing/monitoring portals and how to use VMware vCloud.
All customers are provided documentation for using the Six Degrees IaaS. Six Degrees can also run individual and group training sessions for using these clouds. The sessions are delivered via WebEx or face-to-face.
At a base level Six Degrees don’t charge customers to on-board/off-board from the Six Degrees IaaS. Should an organisation require additional support as part of the on-boarding process, such as project management/detailed technical design, then Six Degrees might need to charge for this. This will be charged as time and materials or as a pre-agreed flat service fee.
Once engaged with Six Degrees and a contract has been signed we’ll provision a resource area and grant the user access to our self-service portal and ticketing system where support and service requests can be made.
Service documentation
Yes
Documentation formats
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • Other
Other documentation formats
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Viso formats are available.
End-of-contract data extraction
Customers can export their servers to a OVF format and download to their local machines. Where necessary Six Degrees Service Desk can provide solutions for large or complicated migrations away from Six Degrees.
End-of-contract process
Six Degrees do not charge for off-boarding as standard and organisations can exit the Six Degrees service without penalty. Where reasonable, Six Degrees will support the client exit of the service, export virtual machines, and decommission resource. If full project management or large-scale support is required, then Six Degrees reserve the right to charge the client. This will be agreed in advance, prior to termination.

Using the service

Web browser interface
Yes
Using the web interface
Six Degrees have a vCloud Director portal to allow customers to fully manage their environment, such as building, editing and removing resource.
Web interface accessibility standard
WCAG 2.1 AAA
Web interface accessibility testing
Six Degrees have not undertaken any direct testing with assistive technology although the vCloud Director Portal provided for customers to access the environment has undergone rigorous assistive technology testing from VMware. Therefore the Six Degrees IaaS is able to support users with disabilities and special requirements.
API
Yes
What users can and can't do using the API
All actions that you can perform by the GUI can be achieved via API.
API automation tools
  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • SaltStack
  • Terraform
  • Puppet
  • Other
Other API automation tools
Ernest
API documentation
Yes
API documentation formats
  • HTML
  • ODF
  • PDF
Command line interface
Yes
Command line interface compatibility
Linux or Unix
Using the command line interface
All actions that you can perform by the GUI can be achieved via the CLI

Scaling

Scaling available
Yes
Scaling type
  • Automatic
  • Manual
Independence of resources
Storage is sold based on fixed IOPS, meaning performance is guaranteed irrespective of other user requirements. We can also provide dedicated virtual and bare metal resource for customers who want to further protect their environment.

All customers pay for reserved bandwidth. Six Degrees monitor shared inbound connections at our peering level. If a customers usage becomes unusually high we will be alerted. Where necessary customers traffic will be restricted or black holed (in a DDoS attack) to protect our other customers bandwidth requirements. DDoS service options, both Layer 3/4 and Layer 7, are available as chargeable services should customers require.
Usage notifications
Yes
Usage reporting
  • API
  • Email
  • SMS

Analytics

Infrastructure or application metrics
Yes
Metrics types
  • CPU
  • Disk
  • HTTP request and response status
  • Memory
  • Network
  • Number of active instances
  • Other
Other metrics
  • Availability
  • Running Services
Reporting types
API access

Resellers

Supplier type
Not a reseller

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Other security clearance
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
User control over data storage and processing locations
No
Datacentre security standards
Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
Penetration testing frequency
At least once a year
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
  • Encryption of all physical media
  • Other
Other data at rest protection approach
SAN storage encrypted at rest. Customer can use own encryption at the OS level.
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
Backups can be taken of server states and data repositories.
Backup controls
Backups are configured to the customers requirements via the service desk.
Datacentre setup
Multiple datacentres with disaster recovery
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
  • Other
Other protection between networks
A virtual private network is created for each customer. This is logically isolated from other networks and each are controlled by a firewall for security.
Data protection within supplier network
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
  • Other
Other protection within supplier network
A virtual private network is created for each customer. This is logically isolated from other networks and each are controlled by a firewall for security.

Availability and resilience

Guaranteed availability
Six Degrees offer a 99.99% availability SLA on all components up to the OS.
Approach to resilience
All components have been built in fully resilient pairs. With fully resilient networking links between all components and to external third parties, including multiple ISPs. For host availability Six Degrees use VMware’s HA failover for redundancy.
Outage reporting
All infrastructure is monitored on the network 24/7. Should there be an outage monitoring alerts are sent to the Public Sector operations team via e-mail and SMS.

Identity and authentication

User authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Limited access network (for example PSN)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Other
Other user authentication
2+1 factor authentication using a certificate, token and password to access the Public Sector VPN which is required to reach the vCloud Service. API is additional protected with a WAF
Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
Only authorised contacts are granted access rights to Public Sector cloud allowing them to connect to the secure VPN to manage their service. The Service Desk for support will only accept requests from authorised contacts. Communication with anybody at Six Degrees will need to be pre-approved by a known individual in writing. Management of the infrastructure is via dedicated connectivity and out of band of customer data and customer networks
Access restriction testing frequency
At least once a year
Management access authentication
  • 2-factor authentication
  • Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
  • Limited access network (for example PSN)
  • Dedicated link (for example VPN)
  • Other
Description of management access authentication
2+1 factor authentication using a certificate, token and password to access the Public Sector VPN which is required to reach the service, including management areas.
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 have access to real-time 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
LRQA
ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
03/10/2022
What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
N/A
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
Yes
Who accredited the PCI DSS certification
IT Governance
PCI DSS accreditation date
08/11/2023
What the PCI DSS doesn’t cover
Only the physical and environmental security at the data centres we use in our operations were included in this assessment. The relates to the provision of the secure physical environment for the Colocation Services that Six Degrees provides to its clients. All other services provided by Six Degrees, internal systems supporting business operations or for other clients are specifically excluded from this assessment.
Cyber essentials
Yes
Cyber essentials plus
Yes
Other security certifications
Yes
Any other security certifications
  • ISO 9001
  • ISO 22301
  • PSN Compliance Certified
  • SOC 1 Type 2
  • SOC 2 Type 2

Security governance

Named board-level person responsible for service security
Yes
Security governance certified
Yes
Security governance standards
  • ISO/IEC 27001
  • Other
Other security governance standards
ISO 27001:2013, Cyber Essentials, PSN
Information security policies and processes
All ISO 27001:2013 controls and associated policies are in place. Enhanced weekly and also quarterly external approved scanning vendor (ASV) vulnerability scanning. Six Degrees also comply with our PSN CoCo which is aligned to our security principles that allows us to deliver our customers PSN Secure and Protect.
Six Degrees operate a rolling internal audit programme to ensure continuity of compliance to our various accreditations, as well as internal technical auditing of our systems through the use of various integrity checks. This is ensures that there is always a fully justified and documented Change Request for any modification of our secure systems.

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
All non-standard changes must be pre-authorised by going through a peer, senior and CAB approval process. Standard changes are created in template form and are approved in CAB before being implement into Change controls.
Vulnerability management type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Vulnerability management approach
Six Degrees (Public Sector) run an internal vulnerability test once a week. All reported vulnerabilities that are reported are categorised into priority depending on the severity and a case is logged with the operation team who will fix the vulnerability under the time frames dictated by Public sector patching policy. This conforms to the PCI-DSS standard.
Protective monitoring type
Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
Protective monitoring approach
Six Degrees (Public Sector) have a protective monitoring system where all logs are centralised and checked on a daily basis for security breaches using several key search filters. Alerts are sent out for high risk activity and are pro-actively responded to by the operations and security teams. This conforms to the PCI-DSS standard.
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
Six Degrees operate an ITIL aligned incident management process with associated procedures for security related incidents. The process has a clearly defined governance framework, including roles & responsibilities, clear policies and associated KPIs. This process conforms to PCI DSS.

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
VMware
How shared infrastructure is kept separate
The Public Sector cloud is multi tenanted and is logically partitioned between its customers using virtual private networks safe guarded from each other using dedicated firewall partitions. The self-service portal only allows access to the resource that has been granted to that particular customer at login and they cannot see or control other areas.

Energy efficiency

Energy-efficient datacentres
Yes
Description of energy efficient datacentres
Six Degrees use the Ark datacentres in Spring Park, Corsham, and Cody Park, Farnborough, for its public sector cloud services. ARK are Participants of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency for SQ17, P1, and A9.

Through selecting Ark this demonstrates to our clients a commitment to reduce energy and make cost savings during Business As Usual. Working with Ark, clients can save more than £1.1 million and 6,000 tonnes of carbon annually based on a 1MW load, compared with an average data centre facility – lowering the Total Cost of Ownership across the Industry. Situated within secure compounds and boundaries, each Ark protects to Business Impact Level 3 (BIL3) as a minimum, without compromising availability, sustainability or price point. Ark currently has two dedicated data centre campuses spread across 74 acres in Wiltshire and Hampshire, with access to 160MVA of diverse power.

Social Value

Social Value

Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

Fighting climate change

We have an established environmental committee that is specifically focussed on ensuring that we apply an approach of continuous improvement in relation to environmental compliance and good practice. As part of our environmental commitments, we are aligned to ISO 14001(Environmental Management) and have a published Carbon Reduction Plan on our website, which was measured and recorded in accordance with GHG Protocols and Procurement Policy Note 06/21.

We will be reviewing our footprint on an annual basis and carrying out actions identified to reduce our footprint. We are committed to achieving Net Zero by 2050 at the latest. During this time, targets will be set for the remaining period to ensure Net Zero will be achieved by our target date. We are aiming to reduce our absolute carbon emissions by at least 90% from our baseline year or achieve (and maintain) a carbon intensity metric of <1 tonne CO2e per employee, whichever comes soonest. This is in line with science-based Net Zero targets.

Our largest environmental burden is the use of power in our datacentres. We use technology designed specifically to manage power consumption. We are very proud to have switched our data centres fully to use green and renewable energy.

Our focus on environmental performance as a supplier under this framework will benefit you as you strive to achieve your own Net Zero targets.

As a leading Microsoft partner, we can work with Microsoft to help you understand the carbon footprint for your existing estates, and how a transition to hybrid/public cloud could help reduce it. As part of any agreement under this framework we can also engage with your local communities to promote environmental awareness or engage in projects that benefit the environment.

Tackling economic inequality

Six Degrees supports this theme in several ways. Firstly, by working with local communities to provide mentoring and job opportunities. We take pride in employing local people and offering new opportunities as they arise. We do this through our internal Talent Acquisition (TA) team, who are actively building richer and deeper contacts within the local community to raise aspirations of people from all backgrounds.

We seek to encourage local people to work within the technology sector by removing barriers to entry, for example through behavioural interviewing with objective behaviours that actively seek to remove bias (unconscious or otherwise) in recruitment and individual development discussions. Our TA team partner with local universities, schools and colleges to support careers fairs and our subject matter experts provide talks on IT or cyber security to local students.

We are also very passionate about our ‘Women in Tech’ group, which seeks to encourage women into IT through all sorts of activity, such as webinars, school visits and other events. We are continuously planning new events and initiatives under this scheme, which we could then offer to buyers and their community as part of engagements on this framework.

Secondly, we will tackle economic inequality and the digital skills gap through creation of new skills & jobs in the high-growth cyber security sector. Our cyber apprenticeship programme, sponsored by our People Business Partner & Cyber Consultancy Director, provide skills and accreditations that enable our people to progress in cyber security or transition into that space.

We also run in-person events, known as ‘Cyber University’, as an education scheme for our Buyers based on our extensive knowledge and experience in Cyber Security. Cyber University provides an open forum for customers to create new skills in Cyber Strategy, best practice approaches and the latest in Cyber Security.

Equal opportunity

We recognise that people are more likely to be engaged and productive if they are rewarded fairly and offered flexibility to help achieve a positive work life balance. We therefore pay at the Real Living Wage in all of our roles, and remain committed to our ongoing pay review process to ensure all our employees are fairly rewarded. Six Degrees also has a continuous focus on closing the gender pay gap in our company, with our latest report available on our website.

We recognise that females are underrepresented in education, training and employment related to STEM. To combat this, we have introduced several strategies to bring new females into the organisation. These include our engagement with schools, colleges, and universities to raise the aspirations of females toward tech. Our goal of ensuring every recruitment shortlist contains as least one female, and our offer of a guaranteed interview for every shortlisted female.

We have collaborated with the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (ENEI), achieving a bronze TIDE Award in our first two years of collaboration. Through our continued devotion to improving, we were awarded a silver status in 2023. Through this partnership we have focused our work around seven critical areas of inclusion – our workforce, our strategy and plan, leadership and accountability, recruitment and attraction, training and development, employment practices, and communication.

We have zero tolerance to slavery in any form, but by no means limited to, bonded labour, debt bondage, serfdom, forced labour, child slavery, marital slavery, sexual slavery and/or human trafficking. We expect all those in our supply chains to comply with our values and the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which is governed by our Supplier Management and Sustainable Procurement Policy.

Wellbeing

Supporting our workforce’s health and wellbeing is crucial to Six Degrees. We have established an employee network, known as the 360 Degrees Group, which is made up of people who are passionate about making a difference from across all different business units, with an Executive-level sponsor and SLT-level sponsors for each sub-group or initiative. The initiatives include:

- Including Everyone, Everywhere: Our forum which focuses on diversity and inclusion: it’s about creating a Six Degrees where everyone feels able to bring their truest self to work.

- Healthy Minds, Healthy Lives: Our forum for mental health and general wellbeing. A healthy mind and body is at the core of being happy and productive at work and at home.

- For The Benefit of Others: There’s something that touches, motivates or inspires all of us; this is a forum which focuses on charity fundraising, on making a positive mark on the communities which Six Degrees touches, and on making this a greener place to work.

We operate a well-being calendar led by Healthy Minds, Healthy Lives and also have certified Mental Health First Aiders across the business, demonstrating our commitment to providing our workforce with wellbeing support.

We have a significant focus on building awareness and promoting dialogue around health and wellbeing: our Women in Tech committee talks about female health, and for June (Men’s Health Awareness Month) they will be promoting awareness of men’s health, for example testicular and prostate cancers.

Under the 3rd initiative we actively encourage community engagement through numerous social value activities. These include collaborative and individual fundraising projects for our partnership with Macmillan as well as promoting events within communities. In 2019 we sponsored the Women in IT awards and have also sponsored a Tough Mudder charity event.

Pricing

Price
£0.01 a virtual machine an hour
Discount for educational organisations
Yes
Free trial available
Yes
Description of free trial
The free trial version of the Public Sector IaaS is the same as the standard production version. Resource limits and timeframe will be agreed on a case basis.
Link to free trial
N/A - please contact Six Degrees for a free trial

Service documents

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 Publicsector.sales@6dg.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.