Making cloud count in local government

By: Steve Hughes - 30/01/2014

Having joined Colt in 2008, Steve Hughes is the leading Cloud and Virtualisation specialist for Colt Enterprise Services. Catch up with Steve’s latest views at http://www.twitter.com/coltandthecloud.

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With council budgets falling year on year, local authorities are under continued pressure to cut costs while also protecting critical frontline services. One way this is being addressed is through the adoption of cloud services and the acceptance of ‘bring your own device’ which are also helping Councils to transform the way that they work and deliver frontline services.

Hammersmith & Fulham Council is a good example of meeting these developments head on. It recently went live with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution provided by Colt to 2,700 employees. Working with IT and business services provider Agilisys, Colt has enabled the Council to reduce costs by up to 25%, boost overall productivity and support the Council in its bid to improve the way it provides services to residents and reduce office space.

The Council pioneered desktop virtualisation 10 years ago but the solution they had in place was limited in the number of users and services that it could support. Employees across all Council departments increasingly need to access applications and data – from laptops, smartphones or tablets – while working in the community, or remotely from other borough offices. While these new ways of working provide both increased flexibility and productivity, the sensitive data stored by many of the Council’s departments means that security must remain a priority.

According to Jackie Hudson, director for procurement and ICT strategy for Hammersmith & Fulham Council: “The important thing for us was finding a service provider who understood what we wanted to achieve and who had the ability to work in partnership with us and Agilisys to provide and integrate the right solution.

When migrating business critical services to a VDI environment, it’s essential to understand the nature of the applications that the organisation is using. Colt worked with the Council and its partners to conduct a virtualisation assessment of the applications and users before developing a proof of concept to allow the Council to experience how applications would perform in the new environment.

After scoping the technical, service and commercial requirements, Colt recommended a solution that addressed the different needs to virtualise and package the 300 applications that the Council has to maintain.

Taking this approach ensured that the IT department could be confident that the solution would support the requirements of users across the Council from housing to childcare, and that it could be rolled out consistently with minimum disruption to employees and frontline services.

The results speak for themselves. Employees welcome the new service because booting up, logging in and launching applications is much faster and the cost of desktop support has reduced considerably. In addition to providing improved performance and productivity, the solution also complies with government IL2 regulation that exists to make sure that sensitive data is stored and protected appropriately.

For many IT departments, the balance between maintaining corporate control and enabling access to applications and data from multiple devices and locations can be a real challenge. But for Hammersmith & Fulham Council, implementation of the Colt VDI solution has enabled it to provide employees with the flexibility they need to provide frontline services when they are out in the field, yet ensure an appropriate level of security for sensitive data, and all at a reduced cost.


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