The cloud doesn't save us money, and we need MORE technical staff than before, claims local authority IT chief

Rocco Labellarte of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead thought cloud would cut costs and headcount, but things haven't gone exactly as planned

The shift to cloud computing services hasn't yielded all the benefits that the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead had expected, according to the local authority's head of technology and change delivery, Rocco Labellarte.

Labellarte was speaking at Computing's Data Centre Summit 2015 in London, where he explained he was running the local authority's data centre in a hybrid cloud environment.

"We have an infrastructure that is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) on one side - in one location in Dublin, and a Microsoft-Vodafone data centre in London -while we have on-premise log-on servers locally," he explained.

"We set this up about a year and a half ago - and it's very difficult to maintain from a running-a-business perspective, but it is a pure cloud infrastructure, according to most people's definition," he added.

While Labellarte had been optimistic at last year's Data Centre Summit of finding a return-on-investment (ROI) by moving to a cloud environment - things haven't gone exactly as planned.

"We anticipated that we would require fewer IT people and lower costs, but what we have found is that our costs have shifted from capital to revenue - so our revenue costs have gone up, and we need more staff - not to run the wireless boxes because they're sitting somewhere else - but to know how they are being run," he explained.

He emphasised that if the organisation did not hire the right staff, then it would get "rolled over completely by suppliers doing what they want to, which is typical outsourcing".

"You outsource your IT and have no idea what the heck is going on and then you pay through the nose," Labellarte said.

To sum up, Labellarte said that the local authority has found that the cloud "doesn't save us money, we need more technical staff of a higher quality to make it work, and to do different things - almost to be the police".

He reflected on whether the situation worked for the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

"It's ok - it gives us less of a nightmare of renewing the tin, for example, but then there's an expectation from the business who don't like acronyms or anything like that to say ‘why do we need IT anymore' - so then you shift it into a world where you say, 'it's not just about the wireless boxes anymore - it's about the business, and you as an organisation have to shift the way you work to justify the costs but at the same time try and explain that it's done and it is running so it's time to focus on something else'," he said.

As for advising other organisations who are looking to move to the cloud, Labellarte said that there are probably "a million and one cases where it's actually probably not better to move to the cloud".

So was his organisation right to move to the cloud?

"I'm not sure, I'm still on the fence in terms of whether it is a real benefit; I can see the pros and the cons, but I don't think everyone rushing into the cloud is necessarily the right thing," he explained.

Computing and QA have partnered to launch their cloud computing training campaign, which aims to raise awareness of cloud computing and explore how companies can gain the maximum business benefits.