UK government now using Huddle's platform for 'Restricted' documents

Huddle has brought cloud computing to the UK government, enabling civil servants to share and make changes to policy documents on the collaboration platform. You would think that this had been happening anyway, but the reality is that real-world meetings or e-mail exchanges over documents are the usual method. More significantly, the Whitehall policy wonks will now be able to do this with so-called ‘restricted’ documents as well.

The move means civil servants can now collaborate on so-called IL3 (RESTRICTED) content and is the first commercial public cloud service in the UK. It’s probably going to save a lot of money too.

The deal is with with FCO Services, which runs the UK government’s secure private network. Interestingly, the FCO Services could have chosen a larger US company to provide the collaboration over documents, but they went with Huddle as its servers are within the UK’s borders.

Alastair Mitchell, Huddle’s co-founder and CEO, says government departments were already using Huddle informally and had asked for a version they could use for confidential documents. Huddle is in talks about providing the platform to the US federal government and security services.

Four-year old Huddle recently moved in the Silicon Roundabout area of London, joining the cluster of other startups in the area which the UK government is promoting as a ‘Tech City’ area.