Isle of Man government to save £540,000 a year in private cloud

See also: CIO Profile on Isle of Man Government’s Peter Clarke

The Isle of Man Government (IoMG) has completed the roll out of a private cloud service with Unisys that will save it up to £540,000 a year in operating costs.

According to IoMG CTO Peter Clarke, the infrastructure will shorten the time taken to update user systems to a fraction of what it took before.

For instance, downtime to update 50 applications onto government systems was reduced from around 8hours to about 3 minutes, with a knock-on for productivity in IoMG public services.

Application design and procurement has also been reduced from as much as 60 days, down to one day, speeding up the government’s ability to react to the island’s population’s needs for public services.

Clarke is sure that the benefits the IoMG has gained could reasonably scale to G-cloud initiatives in the UK.

He told CIO UK that the IT operational savings made were about 15 per cent of total IT Operational Expenditure and that the savings made could be multiplied 700-fold if G-cloud services were set up across the UK.

“We have opted for a private cloud, which is managed and owned and managed by us, overall. What we have achieved could scale in the UK,” he said. “The process we have adopted is applicable to bigger organisations and the results are transferrable.”