Southend-on-Sea splashes £1.5m on hybrid cloud data centre

I was with them all the way until they said they were going to outsource running it from 2019. It's ludicrous to build something internally with the intention of outsourcing it a couple of years later.

In house DC makes sense for many use cases

Some things I host externally, some things I run locally in my own DC. Key drivers are cost, quality and reliability. Comms links are way more likely to fail than the suppressant being triggered in the DC. Even with the dual redundant WAN links I have had more comms failures than DC failures in the last 5 years. Commodity stuff I will host/use cloud (e.g. email, office), business specific stuff (e.g. systems of record, finance, hr etc) I will keep on premise with suitable off site data backups. People can usually live without email for a few hours (we have a in house phone switch, none of your cloudy nonsense), but living without customer records for more than 10 minutes is fairly bad.Just to be sure, I have two DCs 700m apart with generator backup. You know it makes sense.

"I have two DCs 700m apart "

I hope you mean miles. 700 Metres is way too close. A local disaster could easily impact both.

Costs

Still can't get cloudy costs to add up for our organisation either. It'd cost us more than 10x what we pay now to move to cloud hosted services instead of having it on-site. Cloudy stuff just doesn't compute for me.

Cost

Of course it is difficult to speculate if you don't have a grasp of their project (how much data, networking etc) but 1.5m seems quite optimistic for a council the size of Southend.

To be fair we have enough empty office space in Southend from ex-HMRC buildings and old bank offices to be able to build a big Data Centre - even one with excellent ventilation (CE Heath House, anyone.)

Grumble grumble, council tax increasing, grumble grumble, spend it on roundabouts etc etc etc...

Council invests in ICT..... is this news? Wouldn't it be more newsworthy if Council's weren't investing in IT?

Host or not to host - Is Southend's Hybrid maybe the best of both worlds?

Err, (to use your title) isn't Gcloud is a procurement framework not a data centre or hosting service? The Ojeu tender that Southend seem to have had on their website includes everyone (including those on Gcloud) and allows local business to bid too. Same point really "Erlang Lacod" made. That should boost the locally economy rather than the multi nationals..

....Or do you mean they should host EVERYTHING out through vendors on the Gcloud, like social care data and nhs numbers? Would Southend people consent to this being uploaded into a gcloud vendor? What if it's more expensive like "localzuk" says to do so. I personally would hope they do indeed spend money on keeping this data safe and onsite rather than put it on amazon or google or where nobody knows where it is! Maybe it's GCloud for somethings On-site for others.

...Or do you mean they should be like Glasgow and not put any money into onsite items?

I've worked for local government as a contractor before and looks like they're doing a good job looking at a digital strategy. What's the alternative.....Council puts data out onto cloud and can't find it or it costs too much http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/02/hey_amazon_why_so_expensive_for_sql_server/ . Did you contact them to find out details before you printed the article - would like to have seen more of an article on it and what they're doing? Wish the Council I worked at had such a detailed plan to deal with all the changes happening with technology and data security. Bring on a Digital Pier to spice up your picture! Is there a right way or a wrong way for local authorities at the moment.

Seems like they get bashed either way.

pierless approach

Where's the seagull ? Someone changed the picture. I'm sure thats now the backdrop where Arthur Daley used to saunter off our screens at the end of Minder.

It is certainly positive to see a local authority running their own DC on their own premises.

What I know about UK local authority finance could probably be printed nicely on the back of a postage stamp in 16 pitch font but I guess I'd like to see a bit of detail around this to show viability.

Councils are having their budgets painfully squeezed by Central government still, so with year on year cuts the norm can they afford this ? Have they thought about consolidating services with another local authority ? Will it create new jobs or cause redundancies as a scramble to reduce paper headcount ? And indeed will Arthur Daley be taking care of the data migration..