Hillingdon to migrate desktops to cloud

London council's cloud migration gathers pace

Hillingdon Council is set to move around 4,000 desktops into the cloud as it looks for more effective ways to deliver IT services to staff.

The council is looking to migrate desktops, email, calendar and document collaboration functions to a cloud provider over the next few years.

It intends to move nearly 3,500 desktop licences to the cloud, along with provision for about 500 so-called archive licences.

Hillingdon has been an enthusiastic adopter of server virtualisation technology, and may see the adoption of cloud-based desktop services as a logical progression.

It is also investigating the use of cloud-based data storage and is working with CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, to determine what security mechanisms would need to be put in place for a council to store data in the cloud, as well as any limits on what type of data could be stored there.