Staffordshire County Council has turned to the private cloud to help deliver more public services online to residents, with the help of managed services provider ANS Group.
The Manchester-based firm has overseen the design and implementation of the council’s new IT infrastructure, which combines Cisco, NetApp and VMware’s technology to create a private cloud environment.
The project will save the council money on hardware and maintenance, it has been claimed, and will provide it with a faster, more reliable IT environment.
ANS also claims the project has boosted the resiliency of the council’s two datacentres and increased their capacity, which should ensure uptime during periods of essential maintenance.
Vic Falcus, head of IT service management at Staffordshire County Council, said the cloud move was necessary because the organisation’s old IT setup was no longer fit for purpose.
“Because we required a significant upgrade, we needed to ensure that we had a flexible and scalable solution and a partner that would ensure that our network would support future and strategic changes in the way that Staffordshire County Council operates.
“Not only did we achieve this, we also reduced our future expenditure by 40 per cent,” said Falcus.
Paul Sweeney, managing director of ANS, added: “Councils are finding that more and more of the services they provide to the public rely on IT and older infrastructures simply aren’t able to cope with this new demand.
“With this investment, Staffordshire County Council now has a cutting edge IT infrastructure in place, with an improved capacity for handling increasing workloads,” he concluded.
