easy to adopt, easy to use, easy to leave
service description
API accessible
Cloud Storage
IaaS
version 5.1
Open
Contents
Highlights .............................................................................................................................. 3
Overview ............................................................................................................................... 3
Example use cases ............................................................................................................... 4
Trial service .......................................................................................................................... 4
Information assurance........................................................................................................... 4
Product features.................................................................................................................... 5
Technical features................................................................................................................. 5
Service options ..................................................................................................................... 6
Backup / Recovery & Disaster Recovery ............................................................................... 6
Service levels ........................................................................................................................ 6
Pricing ................................................................................................................................... 7
Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 9
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Highlights

Amazon S3 compatible storage API – use applications which currently work with
S3 and benefit from UK based cloud storage

Pan Government Accredited & PSN Accredited - recommended for all systems at
OFFICIAL or systems having IL0-IL3 (IL4 by aggregation) or OFFICIALSENSITIVE assets.

Exceptional value – dual site IL3 accredited Storage from 37p per GB

Immediately available at all impact levels – zero delay to your project.

All datacentres are highly resilient, Tier3 and UK sovereign with >50 miles
separation.

Free connectivity via PSN as well as low cost connectivity options via Internet or
other government secure networks (e.g. N3, GSI, IPED, etc.). You can also
provision your own dedicated connectivity solutions such as X-Kryptors, CPA
foundation grade, Leased Lines, MPLS, WAN acceleration, etc. True API driven
Object Storage – access your data directly from your locations or from applications
you choose to host on the Skyscape Compute-as-a-Service platform
Overview
API accessible Cloud Storage allows developers to write new applications, leveraging
REST/SOAP frameworks, to simply and easily control and consume Storage-as-a-Service
directly from their own applications, by the simply leveraging of a trusted web services API
which is compatible with Amazon S3.
The service is both Pan Government Accredited and PSN Accredited at IL2 and IL3 and
hence provides the most robust levels of assurance that the Skyscape cloud platform is
designed for IL0-IL3 systems (and IL4 by aggregation) as well as data classified as
OFFICIAL or OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE. This enables Public Sector organisations to gain the
benefits of secure, purpose build, on-demand resources that meet their stringent
requirements, all on a true utility (pay for what you use) consumption model.
Further, Skyscape can provide a range of Service Levels – related to data protection and
durability – allowing Consumers the ability to match their data needs with an appropriate
level and cost instead of designing everything to the highest level when not needed.
Skyscape’s service has been designed specifically of for the UK public sector and is
available only to the UK public sector. The service supports and complies with all relevant
areas of the Government ICT Strategy and Information Principles for the UK Public Sector.
Skyscape’s datacentres are some of the most energy efficient in the world and as such
support the Green Government ICT Strategy in full.
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Example use cases
Simpler
Better
Cheaper
Organisations wanting to
reduce the complexity of
managing storage. API
accessible storage provides
consumers with new levels of
simplicity. No more managing
of capacity, file systems, RAID
groups – just consume what
you want, when you want, how
you want. Ideal for transient
data projects requiring
fluctuating storage
requirements.
Organisations seeking a better
way to solve the growing
problem of storing increasing
amounts of data. API
accessible storage provides
inherently scalable storage
with flexible data protection
levels on a true utility basis.
Organisations looking to
implement low cost, Pan
Government Accredited
storage to avoid expensive
Capex solutions. Particularly
suited for long term archives
(digital evidence, medical
images, etc) and other large
data sets
Trial service
Skyscape offer a 30 day free trial for a single organisation with up to 5TB of storage,
available upon request. Free trials are subject to additional terms and conditions which are
available on the Cloud Store.
Information assurance
Skyscape API Accessible Storage has achieved both Pan Government Accreditation (PGA)
and PSN Accreditation for systems at Impact Level 2 and Impact Level 3. The service has
also been implemented with the following security features:

Provides assurance in excess of the fourteen Cloud Service Security Principles
published by Cabinet Office.

Suitable for IL0, IL1, IL2 and IL3 assets (and IL4 by aggregation) under the GPMS
(Government Protective Marking Scheme).

Suitable for OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE assets under the GSC
(Government Security Classifications).

PGA approved Cross Domain Bridge (gateway) – designed to facilitate connectivity
between higher security domains (e.g. IL3) and lower security domains (e.g. lower
OFFICIAL, IL2).

In addition to PGA and PSN Accreditation, Skyscape also hold independent
ISO9000, ISO20000 and ISO27001 accreditations which underpin our business
operations and Cloud Platform.

All datacentres are highly resilient Tier3, UK sovereign and separated by >50 miles
for geographical diversity.

Skyscape staff are Security Cleared and based in the UK.

Protective Monitoring (aligned with GPG13) across all Skyscape platforms at the
hypervisor layer and below
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Product features
The Skyscape API accessible Cloud Storage service makes application access to storage
stateless and location-independent, greatly simplifying application architectures and
improving flexibility and resiliency. The service provides the following features;

Range of services levels – chose the right service, and the right price for what you
and your application / data require.

Natively supports REST or SOAP interfaces.

Leverage hundreds of existing Amazon S3 compatible applications via the Skyscape
S3 gateway API.

Unified namespace allows objects to live anywhere within our UK data centres, and
for multiple sites and app servers to use the same storage.

Elasticity – the solution scales indefinitely and on-demand allowing unpredictable
capacity growth by never requiring storage provisioning ever again.

Metered Billing – the organisation is charged by how much (or how little) storage is
consumed. The service is billed on the basis of the resources used during a period of
time (1 month minimum) based on metrics including consumed capacity and
bandwidth.

Assured Security – the platform is Pan Government Accredited and PSN Accredited
at both IL2 & IL3, hosted in highly resilient Tier3, UK sovereign data centres and
benefits from QinetiQ’s Protective Monitoring solution at IL2 & IL3.

Green – the Skyscape service is based in UK data centres which offer market
leading efficiency around power and cooling. A Skyscape solution will generate less
Carbon than many other solutions.

Geodiversity – the platform spans two UK data centres separated by over 50 miles
Technical features
API accessible Cloud Storage provides the following features:

Wide support of developer languages & frameworks - simple and secure access
using almost any language or framework including .NET, Java, C, Flex, PHP, Python,
Ruby and JavaScript with language bindings, as well as offering new modules for
Drupal and content-addressable storage (CAS) developers.

Developers who have already written an application to leverage Amazon S3 services
can easily migrate to the secure, UK hosted Skyscape API accessible Cloud Storage
service via the S3 compatible gateway.

Connectivity via a variety of networks; PSN, Internet, GSI/GCF, N3 and Private
Circuit options.
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Service options
Skyscape provide three Service Levels to choose from:
BASIC
STANDARD
ENHANCED/ENHANCED
PLUS
Service Level
Agreement
99.90%
99.95%
99.99%
Protection Level
Single copy
Local Protection
Remote Protection
Scalability
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Retention
Configurable
Configurable
Configurable
QinetiQ Protective
Monitoring
Included for IL3
IaaS
Included for IL3
IaaS
Included for IL3 IaaS
ENHANCED PLUS has greater data durability
Backup / Recovery & Disaster Recovery
Organisations can choose from a range of protection levels.
BASIC data is stored in a single named UK Data Centre with no additional data protection
and the most cost-effective price point. This is typically suitable for storing a second copy of
data where you can recreate or restore the data from a primary copy in the event of data
loss.
STANDARD data is stored in a single named UK Data Centre with data protection using
EMC GeoParity coding which provides a degree of fault tolerance and so improves data
durability.
ENHANCED data is stored in two UK sovereign Data Centres, with a copy maintained in a
primary named UK Data Centre and copied to a geographically remote UK Data Centre. This
provides the highest degree of fault tolerance (including site failure) and corresponding data
durability.
All service levels also allow for the implementation of versioning which can be useful in
allowing data to be reverted to a previous version if the latest version becomes corrupt.
Consumers can also implement a Disaster Recovery solution by writing data independently
to each data centre at our STANDARD (and BASIC) Service Levels.
Service levels
Skyscape will use reasonable endeavours to ensure that the availability of the Skyscape
service purchased by the Customer in a given calendar month equals the applicable
Availability Commitment. To define availability, Skyscape monitors a number of service
elements – some generic, some service specific – which collectively enable the Customer to
use or access the Service. If the availability of the Service is less than the associated
Availability Commitment, the Customer may request Service Credits for the Service within 30
calendar days of the Service being deemed unavailable. For more detailed information on
our SLAs, please request the Skyscape SLA Definition Document.
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Skyscape provide both an Availability SLA and Response Time SLA for Storage as a
Service as per the following table.
Availability (monthly*)
BASIC
STANDARD
ENHANCED/ENHANCED
PLUS
99.90%
99.95%
99.99%
Incident response
P1 – within 15 minutes
P2 – within 4 hours
P3 – within 24 hours
P4 – within 72 hours
Incident update
P1 – hourly
P2 – every 2 hours
P3 – every 24 hours
P4 – every 24 hours
Service credits
5% of monthly
spend
10% of monthly
spend
15% of monthly spend
* Availability indication based on an average 730hrs per month. Excludes planned &
emergency maintenance. Unavailability applies to existing data where the data becomes
inaccessible due to a fault recognised at the IaaS layer or lower:

i.e. fault is not within the Consumers control (client applications, user networks, etc)

fault is within Skyscape controlled components such as the storage infrastructure,
power and physical firewalls & routers etc.

External connectivity providers (e.g. internet, PSN, GSi) and components colocated
at Skyscape are also not included in the availability calculation.

Please see the SLA Definition document for more detailed information
In addition, Skyscape also provide an Availability Service Level Target on the Skyscape
Portal i.e. the ability to log into the portal to create support tickets and use other functions.
Target Availability (monthly*)
Client Portal Availability (monthly)
99.90%
Pricing
Service Level
IL0
IL2
IL3
BASIC
£0.11
£0.13
£0.16
STANDARD
£0.15
£0.17
£0.21
ENHANCED
£0.30
£0.35
£0.37
ENHANCED PLUS
£0.42
£0.47
£0.78
Pricing is per GB per month
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Ancillary Options
The Skyscape Pricing Guide provides a comprehensive catalogue of pricing; including all
ancillary service options available to consumers when used in conjunction with Skyscape
Compute as a Service. Ancillary options include:

Offline facilities to support data ingestion and extraction.

Connectivity options including PSN, N3, Internet, data centre interconnect, etc.
Other ancillary options are available and can be found in the Skyscape Pricing Guide.
Commitment Discount
Customers can gain a discount off the standard rates by making a commitment for minimum
monthly amounts during a 12 month period. The commitment relates to spend during the
period (rather than VM’s or GB’s) as follows:
PO Value
Discount Level
<£250K
0%
£250K-£499K
9%
£500K-£749K
13%
£750K-£1,499k
16%
£1,500K +
19%
Customers will be required to raise a non-conditional purchase order for the required net
amount (after discount) which will entitle them to receive services up to the value of the
gross (pre-discount) amount. Customers will be required to break-down the commitment
with monthly spend amounts – any amount not consumed within an individual month will not
be rolled forward to a subsequent month. Discounts are per purchase order only.
Worked Example:
If you know that you will spend at least £300,000 per year with Skyscape, you can make that
commitment and receive an effective 9% discount. We would require a PO of £273,000
(£300,000 less 9%) which will be payable even if you don’t consume that level of Skyscape
services within 12 months. Any consumption in excess of £300,000 will be billable at the
standard Skyscape rates unless a new commitment is made.
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Appendix
On-boarding and off-boarding
Service constraints
On-boarding
Skyscape will adhere to the following in terms of
maintenance windows;
Skyscape will create the consumer’s Primary
Administrator account and send the consumer a
Welcome Pack which includes the URL for the
Storage as a Service API and associated
authentication details.
The consumer is then able to use these details to
configure their application (e.g. GeoDrive, Cloud
Tiering Appliance, Documentum, etc) and begin
using the service.
As Skyscape has two UK DC’s, a consumer can
request to be deployed into a specific one at the
time of the order if they require. Whilst unlikely to
ever be rejected, this remains at Skyscape
discretion.
Off-boarding
Prior to terminating the contract, the consumer is
able to transfer all their data out of the solution
(e.g. using the Skyscape API to retrieve data).
When the organisation terminates their agreement
with Skyscape, Skyscape ensures all of the
organisation’s data is deleted.
Service management
As a true Cloud service aligned to the NIST
definition of IaaS, the service is designed to be
self managed via the secure online Skyscape API
and the Skyscape Portal which provides common
Service Management functionality and addresses
standard requirements.
On rare occasions, Skyscape may decide to
assign an experienced, qualified ITIL Service
Delivery Manager to some Consumers. In these
cases, the SDM will provide additional assistance
with reporting, incident escalation and continual
service improvement, at all times following
Skyscape’s ISO20000 certified ITIL-based
process framework.
For Organisations that require more of a managed
service, Skyscape work with a number of Partners
which have extensive capability to provide a
Managed Service wrapper around the Skyscape
IaaS. Skyscape will be pleased to make an
introduction where appropriate.
Skyscape may use EMC as a subcontractor.
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“Planned Maintenance” means any pre-planned
maintenance of any infrastructure relating to the
Services. Skyscape shall provide the Client with at
least twenty four (24) hours’ advance notice of
any such planned maintenance:
Planned maintenance of Skyscape’s infrastructure
relating to the Services shall happen between the
hours of 00:00 and 06:00 (UK local time) Monday
to Sunday and/or between the hours of 08:00 and
12:00 (UK local time) on a Saturday and/or
Sunday. No planned maintenance will take place
on a Saturday unless agreed in advance by both
parties;
Planned Maintenance shall be excluded from any
availability calculation in regard to service credits
but shall be included in the monthly service
reporting;
“Emergency Maintenance” means any emergency
maintenance of any of the infrastructure relating to
the Services. Whenever possible, Skyscape shall
provide the Client with at least six (6) hours’
advance notice:
Whenever possible Emergency Maintenance of
Skyscape’s infrastructure will happen between the
hours of 00:00 and 06:00 (UK local time) Monday
to Sunday and/or between the hours of 08:00 and
12:00 (UK local time)on Saturday and/or Sunday
unless there is an identified and demonstrable
immediate risk to a Clients environment;
Emergency Maintenance shall be excluded from
any availability calculation in regard to service
credits but shall be included in the monthly service
reporting.
Training
Skyscape have created a number of videos, help
guides, manuals and FAQs to help train and
instruct users so that are up and running quickly
and easily.
Skyscape also have a number of Partners who
are able to deliver additional services such as
training, support and managed services.
Skyscape would be pleased to introduce you to
such partners where appropriate.
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Ordering and invoicing
Billing for the service is monthly in arrears.
Payment can be via Purchase Order and Direct
Debit. Skyscape are preparing to be able to
accept Debit/Credit Card payments (e.g.
Government Procurement Card) – please enquire
at time of order to check whether this is available.
Service lead time
Setting up a new organisation will typically be
completed within 5 days from acceptance of
order. Shorter deployment times are typically
achieved and can be prioritised upon request.
Once set up Organisations have instant access to
additional storage resources with no notice period
required as they manage this themselves.
Termination
Terms
At the point of termination, all consumer data,
accounts and access will be permanently deleted,
and will not be able to be subsequently recovered
or restored.
Costs
There are no termination costs for this Service.
Consumers are responsible for extracting their
own data from the platform if required.
Skyscape may make an additional charge for
transferring data out of the service.
Data restoration / service migration
For service migration, Skyscape allows existing
data to be migrated to and from the platform via
the Skyscape API.
Management and administration of layers above
the IaaS (e.g. the systems that utilise the Storage
as a Service platform).
As a core benefit of the Cloud Platform,
consumers are expected to self-manage the
environment including creating and deleting data.
Consumers must be aware of the variable nature
of the billing based on usage.
The consumer is also responsible for ensuring
only appropriate data (e.g. IL0-IL2 or IL3) is stored
and processed by applications on this
environment and that they comply with the
Skyscape Security Operating Procedures (SyOps)
and other information assurance requirements as
specified in Skyscape System Interconnect and
Security Policy (SISP) and associated
accreditation documentation sets.
Financial recompense model
If the service level falls below the stated
availability percentage (excluding Planned and
Emergency maintenance periods), consumers will
be eligible for service credits on affected storage
only. Service credits will be calculated as a
percentage of the fees for the affected services for
the monthly billing period during which the failure
occurred (to be applied at the end of the billing
cycle).
Service
Credit
Cap
BASIC
Service Level
5% of monthly
spend
5% of monthly
spend
STANDARD
Service Level
10% of
monthly spend
10% of
monthly spend
ENHANCED
Service Level
15% of
monthly spend
15% of
monthly spend
Client Portal
1% of monthly
spend per 5%
below service
level target or
part thereof
Up to 5% of
monthly spend
In many circumstances, Skyscape can help
facilitate a bulk migration to the platform using
offline data ingest and extraction – please ask
Skyscape for details.
Consumer responsibilities
The control and management of access and
responsibilities for end users including appropriate
connectivity, security and accreditation if required.
Where access is required over Government
Secure Networks such as N3, GSI or PSN, the
consumer is responsible for adhering to the Code
of Connection.
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Technical requirements
The consumer is responsible for the procurement
or development of the application and the correct
implementation of support for the EMC Atmos API
or the compatible Amazon S3 API.
Consumers have a number of options to choose
from with Skyscape to access their environment
dependant on their requirement. The list below
provides a guide to demonstrate what is possible
but may require further engagement with
Skyscape to explain and validate further:
IL0 – IL2 (Lower security domain)

Standard Internet connectivity over common
protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, etc)

N3 – for access to the Health and Social Care
community. You will be required to complete
the N3 Information Governance Statement of
Compliance process

PSN – You will need to be a PSN Service
Provider or a HMG customer that has PSN
certification.

IL3 (Higher security domain)

Preferred connectivity is over a Government
Secure Network such as N3, GSI or PSN

N3 – for access to the Health and Social Care
community. You will be required to complete
the N3 Information Governance Statement of
Compliance process. (additional controls may
need to be implemented to enable N3 access
to the higher security IL3 domain)

PSN/GSI - You will need to be a PSN Service
Provider or a HMG customer that has PSN
certification.

PSN or CAS(T) Leased Line (IL3 over IL2)
o

Leased Line (CAS(T) compliant) or nonCAS(T) using CPA/PEPAS overlay encryption

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CPA/PEPAS approved solution
providing overlay encryption (e.g.
Cisco ISR/ASR)
IL0 (e.g. Internet or non CAS(T) circuit) to IL3
VPN
o
Site-to-Site VPN using CAPS
approved solutions (e.g. Ultra AEP
X-Kryptor)
o
CPA assured solution where
Foundation Grade assurance is
appropriate (e.g. Cisco ISR/ASR)
IL3 Leased Line (assured network
connection)
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