French infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) OVHcloud is gunning for a larger slice of the UK healthcare market through the creation of several sector-specific technology offerings, spanning private cloud and bare metal services.
The offerings are being made available under the OVHcloud Healthcare banner, which is geared towards supporting healthcare organisations that want to accelerate their move to the cloud in a safe and secure way, said company CEO Michel Paulin.
“Our OVHcloud Healthcare offering delivers all the advantages of a flexible, scalable solution on fully-dedicated, highly secure and auditable infrastructure,” he said.
“It’s been designed to provide a trustworthy solution for healthcare organisations seeking hassle-free transition to the cloud. We’re delighted to now be extending this offering to the UK market.”
The services include a hosted private cloud infrastructure platform, based on VMware’s Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) technology, which will be run out of OVHcloud’s London-based datacentres.
It is also bringing to market dedicated, high-performance bare metal servers that are designed to provide the highly-scalable compute power and storage needed to underpin large database deployments, and other medical-related workloads, including 3D modelling and DNA sequencing.
Users of OVHcloud Healthcare services will also have access to round-the-cloud customer support, with the company promising a “first reply” time commitment of 30 minutes or less.
The company has already rolled out its healthcare-specific services in its home country of France, where – since its introduction in 2016 – it is claimed that several hundred firms have made use of the services. It is also live in Germany, Italy and Poland too.
“This extensive coverage makes it easy for healthcare organisations to deploy projects across Europe on a single infrastructure, in full compliance with local laws and GDPR, and protected from all extraterritorial legislation like the CLOUD Act from the USA,” the company added.
The latter is a piece of legislation, referred to in full as Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, which grants law enforcement agencies the right to demand access to data stored on servers hosted by US-based tech firms, including those located overseas.
As previously reported by Computer Weekly, OVHcloud is in the midst of a concerted push to position itself as European-alternative to the American big three public cloud players – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – by emphasising its commitment to keeping customer data out of the hands of overseas governments, and through its championing of open source technologies.
