Surrey County Council moves to shared cloud services model with Nutanix

Surrey County Council has enlisted the help of virtualised storage vendor Nutanix to migrate workloads from its existing datacentre to a new shared services cloud hosting platform.

The move means the local authority can offer cloud, virtualisation and application hosting services to its own employees, as well as those working for other Surrey-based local government and healthcare organisations.

As such, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform will provide the borough and district councils in the region with access to a centrally-managed computing environment that no longer requires them to run their own separate IT operations.

As such, it's hoped this will pave the way for standardisation across the region's various councils and public sector organisations in terms of the platforms and applications they use.

The project is being embarked on to help the council achieve its five-year goal of shaving £200 million off its annual spend, and – in turn – become more operationally efficient.

Surrey County Council said it chose Nutanix with the help of its IT provider Virtuoso and because of how quickly its technology, which allows users to create a shared pool of computing resource by consolidating the server and storage tiers of their infrastructure, took to deploy.

Paul Brocklehurst, CIO of Surrey County Council, said the project will benefit both the council and the area's local residents.

“Nutanix and Virtuoso will enable the council to deliver cost effective, scalable and robust IT services to our local partners, ultimately helping us deliver on our long-term strategy to rationalise and consolidate local government services across the region, saving costs and delivering a better experience to our residents,” he said.

Paul Phillips, regional director of Nutanix, added: “This is a [shared services] model that is easily replicated across local authorities and healthcare providers everywhere, helping them to scale and manage their infrastructure whilst still contributing significantly to the economic and environmental targets placed upon them.”