Surrey County Council tech refresh has saved £70m says IT head

The head of IT at council welcomes spending cuts as an opportunity to innovate

Surrey County Council has saved £70m so far by using IT to revolutionise its processes and infrastructure since it was forced to implement cuts as a result of the government's spending review in October.

The council has been tasked with saving £270m over the next four years as part of the spending review, and Paul Brocklehurst, head of IT at the local authority, has welcomed the challenge.

"We've had to take a transformational approach. You can't save that sort of money by doing things in the same way as you've done them before."

Brocklehurst has examined every aspect of technology across the council, which employs around 8,000 people in 170 offices.

One area which immediately appeared ripe for consolidation was the council's network strategy and datacentre operations.

"Our underlying IT provision across Surrey as a whole was very fragmented. We had 40 separate network contracts and ran 30 datacentres."

He explained that these separate networks stymied efforts to collaborate and share information and systems, even between departments housed in the same office.

The council is now tendering to consolidate all of these networks into one.

"We're going out to market now to buy one network contract which should lower the costs by about 50 per cent and provide the ability to join all offices together."

Brocklehurst added that the purpose is not only to save money, but improve interconnection and performance.

The council is also working towards consolidating its 30 datacentres into two. It intends to keep its principal disaster recovery site, and is building one new datacentre in Surrey, which will be used for all live services.

Although the new datacentre will not be live until March 2012, virtualisation technoligies have already been employed to make the disaster recovery site more efficient.

"We used VMware to go from around 300 racks to around 120," said Brocklehurst.

The council is also in the middle of a Windows 7 rollout, which Brocklehurst described as "very smooth", and will soon move 60 per cent of its user base onto thin clients.

"We're deploying a lot of new services, like the Adult Information Service, via Citrix as web-based services," he said. "We're also using IGEL thin client technology."

Brocklehurst's aim is the same across all of these new solutions, to achieve maximum performance from the minimum costs, comparing services to other councils and private industry where appropriate.

"We're aiming for top quadrant performance with lowest quadrant cost in every case," he said.