Scotland has chosen Pulsant as part of its multi-supplier framework for cloud and co-location services.

Pulsant was previously the supplier on the Scottish central government’s Web Hosting framework and received the additional contract after a tender process.

The announcement is the latest part of the Scottish Government’s ‘Data Hosting and Data Centre Strategy for the Scottish Public Sector.’

This aims to use adoption of cloud computing, virtualisation and co-location to achieve efficiency and energy savings.

"The successful delivery of digital public services is dependent upon ICT," the strategy brief reads. "As the roll out of Digital Services proceeds and the dependency on access to information becomes more critical to the way Government bodies do business and make information available, the rising demand for ICT to be available at all times increases."

It adds: "Most existing data centres used in the public sector are not capable, without significant investment, of meeting this demand for increased capacity and reliability. Meanwhile, we are seeing development of cloud computing, which is increasingly suited to public sector requirements, for example in terms of scalability and security."

"Our cloud service has been designed in line with the Scottish Government’s cloud strategy," adds John Easson, Head of Public Sector Sales at Pulsant. "Pulsant can offer class-leading public and dedicated government community cloud platforms located in a secure vault in our Edinburgh datacentre and multiple secondary platforms located across the UK to provide Disaster Recovery as a Service.

"We also offer hybrid cloud capability that combines public, community and private cloud with local colocation to ensure we can meet the demands of complex public sector cloud migration projects."

"Our investment in new infrastructure, datacentre capacity and multiple cloud platforms coupled with a range of secure connectivity options will provide public sector customers access to a range of class-leading, optimum performance solutions."