Derby City Council has achieved 60% savings on its and it’s data centre provision through a Crown Commercial Service framework

The requirement

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 Crown Hosting Services framework.

The solution

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.

The results

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, benefiting from year on year savings of approximately 60%, as well as the contractual flexibility enabling them to continually examine their IT estate.

To read the original case study from GOV UK, including comment on the project from Derby City Council, click here.