Council saves on their Cloud First strategy implementation
Derby City Council has achieved 60% savings on its data centre provision through a Crown Commercial Service framework.
Derby City Council has a 15-year vision that pledges to ensure that the city of Derby is Safe, Strong, Ambitious and Resilient. It is committed to the UK Government’s Cloud First policy to help drive efficiencies, in both cost and performance.
After a thorough analysis to fully understand the implications of how to achieve this and in particular what the impact would be on their legacy IT estate, it was clear that whilst around 60% of the council’s data applications could be moved to the cloud, the complex nature of the legacy estate, time constraints, and a naturally resistant supply chain, meant that a hybrid strategy – that included an on premise facility – would be required.
To achieve this the council chose to use the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Crown Hosting Services framework.
The Crown Hosting Services framework is a partnership between CCS and Crown Hosting Data Centres that offers easy to buy, highly efficient, co-location and data hosting on a flexible contract basis using medical grade standard.
The service request process allowed Derby City Council to start detailed planning for the implementation of a mixed Cloud and legacy systems migration, and establish the necessary network links with a delayed commencement date. This enabled them to withdraw from existing contracts in a managed way and without incurring unnecessary costs.
“From the outset it was clear that Derby City Council were absolutely committed to the Cloud First strategy, but, as they discovered and in their own words, ‘Not everything plays nicely in the Cloud.’ We have given them the opportunity to take data centre space here at Crown Hosting Service which removes the need to extend often expensive contracts; and gives them a commercial arrangement with real flexibility. They also have the ability to swap out legacy systems for new virtualised solutions, without penalty.”- Crown Hosting Data Centres
Despite any short-term costs involved in migrating to Crown Hosting, it is estimated that Derby City Council will break even within 1-2 years, benefitting from year on year savings of approximately 60%, as well as the contractual flexibility enabling them to continually examine their IT estate.
“The phrase ‘going the extra mile’ is often banded around as a throwaway line but in CCS’s case, this was absolutely true. From implementing diverse routes at near-impossible timescales to helping resolve supply chain issues, the team really did pull out all the stops to make our’s a successful transition.
Getting to grips with a new government IT framework could have been complicated, but everyone at CCS was out to help.
In Crown Hosting Data Centres, we were looking for, and got, something that could provide a rapid service, from an OJEU-compliant framework, and give us a clear and flexible programme plan to completion.”- Alistair Taylor, Senior Project Manager for Derby City Council
This article was originally published here and was reposted with permission.
