“It is interesting local and devolved clients are all suffering from the CSR challenges from last October, which are now really starting to bite into their effective operational plans, and it is interesting to see how different authorities are dealing with it.”
That's the view of Chris Ainslie, MD of Regional Government at BT Global Services who sees a potential solution to these challenges in Cloud Computing and virtualisation technologies, which not only enable cost efficiencies to be realised, but also enable authorities to counter traditional parochialisms:
“I think a lot of councils are now encouraged to buy services from a virtualised environment, where they can actually overcome the political challenge of not wanting to push jobs outside of the council...By delivering virtually it’s almost a nebulous idea about buying services from the Cloud rather than a neighbouring authority. Its things like that which are helping the political agenda to be a bit freer to allow services to be procured and sold from one neighbouring authority to another.”
Ainslie says local authorities aren’t only looking to cross-boundary shared services agreements, but also cross discipline:
“There’s always been a lot of talk about shared services between PCT Trusts, local authorities, police, fire, and indeed central departments if they’re localised. We’re starting to see that.”
He talks about one example implemented by BT Global Services:
“In Norfolk we won a contract to deliver educational school services via a virtualised data centre, and that’s gone to over 400,000 students, over 1,000 schools across Norfolk. We’re delivering single sign-on for pupils delivered out of a data centre in Croydon.”
Ainslie concedes that the company has also got to flex and create new situations for local government:
“Hence the reason why we’re putting a lot of work into virtualisation of services and trying to stand up our capability in delivering national services from a pay-per-view basis delivered from various centres of excellence around the country, and not from any one county.”
Security is arguably one of the reasons beyond some of the lingering reticence towards the Cloud, something Ainslie says has been overcome, adding:
“That hurdle is an old one Security across public services is something BT has always taken a leading role in, and delivered a great deal of existing contracts to IL3 and above standard.”
tags for The Practical Cloud: Dealing with Public Sector cutbacks
