Oxford City Council shifts data centre into the cloud in 10-year contract with SCC

Oxford follows Peterborough in shifting its data centre infrastructure into the cloud

SCC, which claims to be Europe's biggest independent IT services business, has won a 10-year IT infrastructure contract with Oxford City Council.

The deal, an initial five-years with the option to extend by a further five years, will see SCC deliver a range of infrastructure services to the Council, including data centre hosting, server and storage, server technical support, database administration, and network security infrastructure and support.

Oxford's approach to managing its data centre infrastructure by outsourcing the hosting and management to a specialist services provider, contrasts with the strategy adopted by Peterborough City Council, which is shifting its entire infrastructure into the Amazon cloud.

According to Oxford City Council's head of business improvement, Helen Bishop, the Council will also be using SCC's Sentinel service, a "multi-tenanted cloud platform built specifically for the public sector, which the council will use for data centre hosting", according to SCC.

It continues: "Sentinel, the first pan-government accredited cloud platform of its kind, provides flexibility, enabling the council to scale server requirements up or down and pay only for what it uses. This is expected to deliver immediate cost-savings of more than £150k per annum which can be reassigned to the delivery of public services."

SCC claims that Sentinel protects data to Official and Official Sensitive (IL2 & IL3) security standards, and is also used by a number of other major public sector organisations, including the Civil Aviation Authority, DWP, Highways England, HMRC, Yorkshire and Humber Commissioning Support Unit and Mersey Care NHS Trust.

"Throughout the process, SCC consistently showed itself to be professional and responsive by taking note of the information provided and the specification requirements, and offering relevant and comprehensive technical solutions," said Bishop, who claimed that Sentinel had delivered "100 per cent availability in the past two years".

Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit on 23 September will cover public sector and other organisations' shift to the cloud. Registration is FREE to qualifying end uers. See the agenda and register here before places run out.