Cloud services
Norfolk County Council case study: BT Cloud
Read the Norfolk County Council Children’s Services and BT Cloud case study. Learn how they saved physical space and freed up budget by moving applications, storage and security into the cloud.
October 29, 2019
5 minutes
Cloud services
Norfolk County Council case study: BT Cloud
Read the Norfolk County Council Children’s Services and BT Cloud case study. Learn how they saved physical space and freed up budget by moving applications, storage and security into the cloud.
October 29, 2019
5 minutes
Norfolk County Council Children’s Services works with 450 schools across Norfolk, but each used a different IT system, meaning their estate was expensive and difficult to manage.
BT Cloud Compute’s cloud-based data centre infrastructure allowed Children’s Services to manage the estate from one single database for a faster, more efficient and secure solution.
“Only having to input data once rather than up to five times, we’ve calculated the savings could be as much as £2 million to £4 million.” Paul Fisher, Assistant Director.
Having multiple systems across different hardware platforms meant an expensive-to-support, fragmented IT estate. It was also a recipe for compliance and security issues.
Integrating applications and introducing single sign-on were major improvements, but Paul Fisher wanted to go a stage further and reduce costs.
BT had the answer with Cloud Compute. The pre-provisioned, cloud-based data centre infrastructure has enabled Children’s Services to move towards a single database supporting multiple applications, all in a managed environment.
That’s proving to be a far more secure, efficient, and flexible approach.
The challenge
Norfolk County Council Children’s Services works with 450 schools across Norfolk, supporting nearly 110,000 children and young people at all stages of their development. Unfortunately, doing this across multiple systems was an expensive-to-support architecture.
The same data existed in different places, making it impossible to maintain a single version of the truth. Local expertise was a constant problem – school staff had better things to do. Worse, there was a compliance issue: it was impossible to track children’s attendance as they moved around.
Another frustration was that children and staff had to log in again every time they used an application. Not only did this waste time, but the resulting multiple identities created further compliance and security issues.Another penalty was that children and staff had to log on anew to every application. Not only was this time wasting, but also the resulting multiple identities created further compliance and security issues.
We wanted an infrastructure that would integrate our applications with single sign-on capability.
The solution
The first stage of the solution was to adopt a systems interoperability framework (SIF). This added a translation layer between the different systems, enabling them to talk to each other.
With improved data-sharing capabilities across applications, Children’s Services could comply with school attendance regulations. It was also possible to enable single sign-on (SSO).
SSO gives individuals a common identity across different systems, so once a user is signed in to one application, they can seamlessly move to other applications without needing to rekey user names and passwords.
This was a big step in the right direction, but the SIF/SSO architecture was still high cost in terms of multiple processing, storage, and security environments. Furthermore, new education systems would each still come with their own hardware platforms, incurring higher capital costs and still higher ongoing support costs.
The answer was to consolidate all systems onto a single IT platform.
BT Cloud Compute was chosen to host the SIF/SSO infrastructure. Inherently resilient and with 99.9% availability, Cloud Compute is self-healing, should a problem occur. As a cloud-based environment, it enables customers to create, monitor, and manage their own virtual data centres through a self-service portal.
With BT Cloud Compute we saw no start-up costs, and as far as we were concerned that gave us the better financial return.
By eliminating the need for much of the physical hardware in schools and physical data centres, Cloud Compute solution would help Norfolk County Council manage its ICT infrastructure at a much lower cost by moving applications, storage, and security into the cloud.
This would not only lower accommodation requirements, but also cut power requirements and reduce carbon emissions. BT estimates Cloud Compute offers total cost of ownership savings of up to 40% compared with traditional approaches.
A further advantage of Cloud Compute was speed of deployment.
Mike Pickett, manager of Digital Infrastructure, ICT Solutions, at Norfolk County Council says: “If we need new capacity, it can actually be delivered within a few hours.”
The result
The implementation and decommissioning of educational applications can now be achieved via the self-service portal with just a few clicks. Besides releasing expensive accommodation, there are other benefits in terms of being a more child-centred organisation.
Overall productivity in Children’s Services is expected to improve as centralisation and simplification feed through.
“The interoperability infrastructure is absolutely critical in terms of delivering efficiency savings across the estate,” says Mike Pickett.
Across the estate of 450 schools, only having to input data once rather than up to five times, we’ve calculated the savings could be as much as £2 million to £4 million.
Most importantly for Paul Fisher: “With BT Cloud Compute we saw no start-up costs, and as far as we were concerned that gave us the better financial return.”
And all of this is achieved without compromising data security. The council has a very clear security policy to which BT and Children’s Services business processes and personnel conform.
Mike Pickett says: “We know at a technical level that the cloud-based data centre itself is incredibly secure.”
The BT Cloud Compute solution is enabling Children’s Services to progressively move towards a single database supporting multiple applications.
Paul Fisher concludes: “Not only do we see reductions in our carbon output, but also schools are using less space.”
About
- Company
Children’s Services department for Norfolk County Council
- Industry
Education
- Location
Norfolk
Related products
- Hybrid cloud services
