KPMG embarks on massive datacentre consolidation programme

Firm will shut 30 regional facilities and run a private cloud out of a new datacentre in Frankfurt

Financial services company KPMG plans to consolidate all 30 of its European datacentres into one located in Frankfurt, Germany.

It will begin migrating the six largest facilities this week and hopes to start closing them down in June. These six datacentres represent 80 per cent of KPMG's storage capability.

The move will see the company moving systems to a private cloud that will service all KPMG's European users.

Talking to Computing, KPMG CIO Bryan Clark said: "I think cloud computing is absolutely a priority – but in a private cloud. A public cloud would give us massive economies of scale, but it just isn't a practical proposition. It isn't secure enough."

Clark said the consolidation project has reached a critical stage.

"As I speak we have just passed a milestone where our newly built twinned datacentre in Frankfurt is ready to go. It is our aim that this will eventually be the single centre for the whole of KPMG Europe," he said.

"We will start with the large datacentres that service most of our users, but we do aim to consolidate the rest over time," he added.

"We have got a European network in place, which operates on a BT MPLS network, and so it will be relatively straightforward to migrate data across this."

All applications and data will be completely virtualised in the new datacentre, where Clark has been working with T-Systems, EMC, and VMware.

The six largest datacentres will begin to be phased out in June.

"There was quite a lot of diversity in the legacy systems, and each country had its own ERP system," said Clark.

"We have consolidated this into one SAP system, and so far Germany and the UK have completed the change. On the 18 April Spain will be the next to move across from their Oracle system."

Clark said that the motivation behind the consolidation was to not only drive efficiency and reduce costs, but to give the smaller regions more IT power.

"By bringing two large countries together you will reduce your operating costs in those individual countries," said Clark. "But other important benefits are achieved when you begin to add the smaller countries. The marginal cost of adding smaller regions becomes quite low, and you can start to give large-scale IT capabilities to branches that couldn't afford to do that independently."

Clark added that the new datacentre will enable KPMG to offer new services to its clients.

"We have got a new product we are supplying to customers, where we take data from their ERP systems, and put it into our datacentre. We then run some sophisticated analysis on it to verify aspects of their operation," said Clark.