A London Borough Council reduces costs by 54% with Celerity DRaaS, BaaS & Intuition SaaS

The Challenge

The council needed to reduce the complexity and cost of safeguarding public information assets, while ensuring access to critical public services and avoiding any additional financial, management or personnel burden that would increase the pressure on authority budgets. The council had already made a strategic decision towards a cloud service approach and was benefiting from services procured in the digital marketplace via the G-Cloud framework. This strategy opened doors to proven services that reduced risk, streamlined the supply chain and offered economies of scale through consolidated procurement. The increased efficiency through convergence and consolidation enabled greater optimisation without constraint, allowing the council’s personnel resources to focus on social and economic development of new services to the citizens of the borough.

Like many local authorities, the council was constantly challenged when justifying expenditure of public funds and had a requirement to maintain its disaster recovery capability in the wake of transformation in providing services to meet its vision.

The volume, use and value of data has evolved at such a rapid pace over the last few years that today’s backup and disaster recovery systems barely resemble those from a decade ago. The present data protection services at the council no longer met the requirements or aligned to the strategy of the authority.

The Solution

Celerity worked with the authority to better understand its strategic and tactical goals before presenting a more efficient and agile proposition. This solution would provide greater return on investment through higher utilisation and increased consolidation resulting in additional benefits across all business areas, which would be achieved through convergence of backup, disaster recovery and virtualisation.

The council had already partnered with Celerity to support its primary ICT environment, host services in the cloud and access software more cost effectively by adopting Celerity’s Intuition SaaS offering, providing service management, event analytics and alerting.

Celerity listened to the challenges the council were facing and worked with the internal team to develop a solution to improve the present services, by reducing complexity, risk and cost. This resulted in greater efficiency and operational cost reduction for its disaster recovery and business continuity requirements.

Celerity achieved this by leveraging investments in new technology and services already made by the council, ensuring it remained focused on its strategy and goals. The contract provides DR as a Service with improved recovery times and objectives, higher levels of availability, greater security and protection of data more cost effectively for the council and completely replaces the service previously provided directly by a global vendor.

Results

• Continuous access and safeguarding of critical services and information assets
• Reduced operational and administrative costs – produced savings > 54%
• Reduced complexity and improved productivity
• Dedicated account team backed up by UK ITIL service desk
• ISO 27001 secure UK data centre
• Mitigation of resource and skills constraints and challenges
• Reduced commercial and technical risk – Services delivered to meetbusiness driven SLA
• Visibility and alerting of potential issues and failures that could causeservice disruption or vulnerability
• Stronger compliance and governance safeguards – achieved throughintelligent automation, analytics & MI reporting