LONDON, March 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Savvis, Inc. today announced its Government Wide Service (GWS) platform is now available to all government departments and third-party suppliers in the United Kingdom. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform provides a solution for government agencies looking toward a "G-Cloud" model of hosted, reduced-cost IT operations and services.

Utilising Savvis' pre-built, accredited GWS platform virtually eliminates upfront capital costs for new projects and also decreases deployment time. Government IT departments and suppliers benefit from immediate access to infrastructure and only pay for the consumption of their IT services on a pay-as-you-go basis, rather than the costly procurement, maintenance and management of hardware.

"Historically, progress in delivering the e-government agenda has been hampered due to high costs and complexity around government-required risk control and security management," said Neil Cresswell, managing director, EMEA, at Savvis. "Making GWS available to the market removes these hurdles; opening up the government market to a wider range of suppliers and offering government bodies the potential to cost-effectively deploy new services, paying only for the IT infrastructure that they actually consume."

Unlike other platforms in the U.K. market, GWS offers efficient and flexible procurement of data centre infrastructure that includes converged connectivity to secure government networks. The platform is accredited and secure at widely used government impact levels IL3, which is connected to the government intranet, and IL2, which is connected to the public Internet.

"GWS has the potential to be more than a platform: It could serve as a SaaS marketplace for the U.K. government," Cresswell said. "By providing a level playing field for software vendors to deliver services for government departments, GWS ushers in a new wave of smart services and lays the groundwork for government application stores, which will further drive down the cost of IT for the country."