Our current ICT infrastructure is robust, and our services are working 99.95% of the time.
We also have out of hours support services available that provide cover 24 hours a day for 365 days a year.
We use a hybrid infrastructure strategy with a mix of on premises and cloud hosting.
On site
We have a secure onsite data centre at Gun Wharf.
The data centre is host to around half of our computing infrastructure.
The other half located at an off-site location.
Together they form a resilient and reliable computing platform.
We have already made investment in the on premises infrastructure including:
- a secure location
- hardware
- installation
- backup solutions
- dedicated support staff.
The buildings at Gun Wharf and the off site location are already set up to support the on premises data centres, with security, compliance and governance processes in place.
We also make an income from other organisations renting space in our data centre, so we also work as a cloud solution for others using our infrastructure and staff expertise.
An on premises solution suits our current financial strategies where we have income that helps us reduce costs.
Keeping our ICT infrastructure on premises also protects the data held in ICT systems and makes it easy to extract and analyse data from systems using tools such as PowerBI.
The cloud
Where appropriate, cloud based solutions such as Software as a Service (SaaS) will be used if they deliver a benefit to customers and users.
Any cloud based services must let us access all relevant data held within systems.
Cloud services also need to offer the right levels of security, compliance and governance controls.
These controls must be reviewed and approved by ICT.
Cloud services require an ongoing fee, which is usually paid monthly.
This would increase our costs without offering direct savings as we have made investments in on premises infrastructure.
We would also have no control over price increases linked to the retail price index (RPI), which could lead to unexpected revenue pressures.
The increased use of cloud services should be reviewed if there are any major changes to how we operate.
For example, if we ever moved from Gun Wharf to smaller premises, then the use of cloud services would cut the need to provide and maintain an onsite data centre.