53 per cent of London Boroughs consider their IT infrastructures out of date

Nearly 17 per cent say outdated infrastructure the biggest challenge

More than half of London boroughs are planning to replace IT infrastructures they consider outdated, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

Carried out by cloud services company HyperGrid, the FOI was answered by 30 out of London's 32 boroughs, with 53 per cent of them revealing they are planning to refresh infrastructure in the near future, while 20 per cent said they were already in the process of doing so.

Further, 16.5 per cent of the authorities who answered said outdated infrastructure was their biggest challenge in a data centre setting. Also, 10 per cent cited performance as an issue, which could also tie in to a need for more advanced technology.

HyperGrid - rather fortunately for itself - also discovered that 43 per cent of local authorites would consider a "consumption or subscription-based" infrastructure model, while only 20 per cent opposed this.

Perhaps more interestingly, 37 per cent of respondents "claimed that they did not have the information to make a necessary decision, or that it was the responsibility of the service provider". This could say a few interesting things about general knowledge of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), not to mention how so many public sector organisations are putting so many rudimentary decisions in the hands of IT providers.

Needles to say, HyperGrid mysteriously concludes that hyperconverged (with a capital 'H', of course) infrastructure is the way everybody should be going, thought it seems from the research that, at a very basic level, local government doesn't have close to the infrastructure it needs, and education over the possibilities may need to improve.

"Enterprise Cloud is a solution that can empower government leadership to accomplish their organisational objectives while improving the security, scalability, reliability and efficiency of their networks," reasons HyperGrid.

"At a time when public services face fundamental challenges, technology and digital tools and approaches are central to achieving all of this."

Fair enough.