THE RIGHT INVESTMENT CREATING A FIRM FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE
The Challenge
Dundee City Council is a council working in the heart of a reinvigorated city, with significant regeneration projects ongoing. It was recently recognised as one of the Best Places to live in the UK in 2024 (Sunday Times). The council itself, according to Audit Scotland, is one with strong leadership. Thanks to self-awareness about how it performs and ‘sound financial management, with good use of longer-term financial planning.’
They were faced with the challenge of ageing data centres. But significant investment to keep running was a requirement. As well as resiliency upgrades to ensure current and future risks were managable. So, it’s no surprise that the looked at ways to optimise their future plans.
The Solution
Dundee City Council now use colocation to host almost all their ICT in Brightsolid’s Tier III designed data centre in Dundee.
A migration project in summer 2020 led to over 95% of the council’s infrastructure migrating to the Dundee centre. This offset significant costs and improved resilience for Council services.
The council’s decision to opt for colocation had three key drivers: Cost efficiency, best practice and strategic fit. An early cost analysis showed that to continue with on-premises data centres would require a significant investment up to £1m.
This not only covered the costs for the council to continue to manage their own on-premises data centres. It also made necessary improvements in resilience. The investment was not only challenging in terms of size but also in terms of lack of agility. The council wanted more flexibility to be able to take advantage of cost efficiencies speedily.
Scalability was also important, when new technology, performance or software would allow the council to provide the same or new services. However, less equipment and infrastructure will be required.
With colocation, the council was able to increase resilience and improve the management and monitoring of services. Particularly out of working hours and off-set that future investment. Our flexible, modular billing allows the council to translate any infrastructure efficiencies they make quickly in to cost reductions.
Colocation aligned perfectly with the Council’s pragmatic approach to being ‘Cloud First’, where it makes sense. Aiming to be largely public cloud in the long term but ensuring that choices around IT infrastructure deliver the right benefits as they continue on that cloud journey.
The council benefitted from the experiences of partners. NHS Tayside had successfully transitioned their own data centres with Brightsolid. Providing the reassurance that the proposed move to colocation would work in practice.
Brightsolid’s breadth of experience ensured the council was supported during the transition. And allows the Council to consolidate the management of multiple suppliers in future. Peace of mind was enhanced with the successful migration of services went as planned with users being unaffected by the transition.
The Results
- Offset £1million of CAPEX spend for capacity that may not be a requirement in future
- Streamlining supplier management, allowing Council employees to concentrate on core services
- Enhanced internal skills with focussed data centre skills
- Improving resilience and performance for users
- Creating a more agile financial model
- Providing a strong foundation and logical next step to the cloud
Using an experienced data centre partner with established best practices in data centre migrations and data centre management, whose performance we could validate with other government organisations, provided us with significant peace of mind throughout the migration and for the long term.
Graeme Quinn, Senior Manager IT Infrastructure