Resources

Hybrid cloud: Aberdeen City Council Case Study

IMPROVE EFFICIENCY AND CONTROL, SHARE SERVICES

The Challenge

Aberdeen City Council’s vision was to improve efficiency, share services and improve the control that they had over their environment.

This would require a large-scale migration with the minimal impact to users, partners and citizens. Sovereignty and retention of citizen data through and after migration would be of paramount importance especially as the Council was committed to deliver more innovative Digital Services. They needed to scale for increased data, without costly upfront investment. Citizen services had to be highly available, but the Council needed to be prepared to recover and restore critical solutions if the worst happened.

The Council were challenged by technical debt and needed skill and experience to support legacy equipment and they were under scrutiny to deliver real and immediate cost savings and tangible improvements. The new solution also needed to ensure future performance, optimise future costs and enable innovation in their own services as well as shared services delivered with other Councils.

The Solution

Brightsolid delivered a hybrid cloud solution to the Council, blending colocation, private cloud and managed virtual service. Aberdeen City Council’s entire IT infrastructure migrated in a total timeframe of 72 hours, working in the least impactful time slots over a 6-week period to minimise the effect on users.

Services were delivered from the Council’s own infrastructure co-located in Brightsolid’s Tier III designed data centres in Aberdeen and in Dundee, and with resources delivered, on-demand, from Brightsolid’s Private Cloud. The Council also received Brightsolid’s managed virtual machine service sparing them from resource intensive critical patching, back-up and monitoring and alerting services across their multiple infrastructures.

Brightsolid provided secure connectivity services, managing networking across the colocation, cloud and onsite infrastructures and wider world. Performance optimised by including high speed connectivity via dedicated dark fibre optic cables between the Council Sites and Brightsolid as well as Brightsolid’s internet peering. The Council and Brightsolid worked together to design, implement and test a granulated Disaster Recovery Service. This enabled the Council to enact Disaster Recovery processes in a methodical and prioritised way, service by service.

The Results

  • Project delivered, on time, to scope and within budget;
  • 99.99 service availability delivered and guaranteed;
  • Migration delivered in 72 hours during downtime periods over 6 weeks, with minimal disruption;
  • £250k of immediate annual cost savings;
  • Disaster Recovery solution which allowed them to focus on critical service recovery.

“Thanks to Brightsolid, we benefited from immediate operational savings, and feel more ultimately in control of our environment.”

Steven Robertson, Infrastructure Architect