V&A saves £750,000 a year with its IT overhaul

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has made an annual saving of £750,000 by overhauling its IT infrastructure and using managed services and support.

The museum decided in 2002 that it needed to update ageing IT systems to establish a more efficient and robust infrastructure.

'Staff had developed information systems for their own needs,' Ian Croxford, head of information systems services at the V&A, told Computing.

'We came in with a museum-wide information architecture, which brought all those systems together to give us a consistent view and to let us make that information available to the public.'

The V&A contracted IT service provider Bull to redesign and overhaul its IT network, desktop and storage, partly in response to public sector information-sharing recommendations made in the Gershon report.

Croxford says the infrastructure is allowing the museum to work more effectively with third-party organisations on projects.

'The network and infrastructure is so much more reliable,' he said. 'It's moved the goalposts where there's now a far higher level of service expected.

'Now we can commit to working on a joint development project from a position of confidence, knowing we have an infrastructure that works.'

The bulk of the work was completed last year, including the installation of a dedicated backup local area network to connect a legacy server environment to a storage tape library.

'We have since added new bits to the storage network, taking it from 1.8TB to 6TB,' said Croxford.

A collection of Citrix servers was also installed to help make use of older desktops through thin-client access to applications, and provide remote access for home and mobile workers.

Bull has now taken on all V&A IT support and maintenance.