1. WHITE PAPER: Utility Computing for Government
Harnessing the Benefits
of Utility Computing
for Government
Information technology is an essential
vehicle for the delivery of well-organised,
cost-effective public services that respond
to the needs of citizens and business.
Table of Contents
3 ey challenges for
K 8 ey considerations
K
Government IT leaders when choosing a utility
computing partner
4 ethinking IT delivery
R
with Infrastructure-as- 10 ind your solution
F
a-Service with Savvis
6 hybrid approach to
A 11 bout Savvis
A
utility computing

2. The internet, is bringing speed and efficiency to the dissemination of information,
improving access to transactional services and making citizen interactions simpler
and more convenient — whether that be a school-leaver applying for a student
loan, an entrepreneur setting up a business for the first time, or a neighbourhood
watch group scrutinising crime figures.
Local and central government also has the need for technology applications
to connect, mobilise and reduce the cost of internal processes. That means
equipping the civil service to operate flexibly and productively, eliminating
avoidable travel and promoting sustainability. These aspirations (which not
coincidentally support the rationalisation of Government’s large and diverse
property estate) are driving the need to exploit mobile technologies, collaboration
tools and audio and video conferencing.
In parallel, explosive growth in public data — fuelled by the emphasis on
transparency that accompanies the pursuit of modernisation — places
government IT departments at the confluence between policy and technology.
The opportunities for data-driven policy creation and tuning are greater than ever
and should be a key focus of public sector planning.
However, current government IT infrastructure is typically under-prepared to
support this modernisation due to a number of constraints, principally:
• ack of integration, leading to inefficiency and duplication, and impeding the
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sharing and re-use of services
•
Capacity underutilisation in government data centres caused by the historical
practice of planning and provisioning to accommodate (usually rare) peak use
scenarios on dedicated infrastructure
•
Long and costly procurement timescales that prevent government from being
responsive to the evolving needs of citizens and businesses
• arge, unwieldy IT projects that fail to meet mission objectives
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This white paper examines how a “buy not build” approach, analogous to the
consumption of electricity and other utility services, can better meet government
demand for compute resource.
To most efficiently support the modernisation of public services, the paper
advocates a hybrid infrastructure consisting of private and public cloud services
and the colocation of government-owned IT assets in third-party data centres,
provided as a managed service. It goes on to explore how this can achieve
cross-government economies of scale, deliver responsive IT systems, support
the exploitation of new technologies and encourage a more dynamic supplier
marketplace.
Finally, it sets out the criteria that government IT leaders should ascertain
when evaluating any prospective infrastructure partner to reduce risk, maintain
continuous availability of critical systems and maximise efficiency gains.
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3. Key challenges for Government IT leaders
Government IT leaders are squeezed by the opposing pressures of rising
expectations and dwindling budgets. This translates into a mandate to achieve
cost efficiencies, refocus resource on improving public service delivery and
support the transition to a ‘digital by default’ model of citizen service provision.
• Efficiency and financial savings
The prevailing austerity programme demands unprecedented cuts in the way
public sector services are delivered. In parallel, however, the cost and complexity
of acquiring and maintaining internal IT infrastructure to meet rapidly changing
operational demand continue to rise. Furthermore, build-it-yourself IT strategies
in the public (and indeed, private) sector suffer from an inherent lack of
scalability, leading to step-changes in capacity at a time when “just in case”
over-provisioning is no longer an admissible practice.
• Refocus resource
Under pressure to demonstrate accountability for taxpayers’ money, central
and local government must now visibly focus on assisting those in genuine
need, identifying and preventing fraudulent activity and supporting high-quality
citizen interactions. That means directing resource towards the exploitation of
technologies that will deliver benefits to citizens and business alike, faster and
at reduced cost. The bottom line: public money can no longer be justifiably
committed to building and maintaining underlying IT infrastructure that could
be bought more cost-effectively as a service.
• Prioritise online delivery
Online is becoming the consumption model of choice for a growing majority
of citizens, with reduced emphasis on face-to-face, telephone or paper-
based channels. Social media and e-petitions allow citizens greater dialogue
and involvement with government, enabling people to increasingly influence
and contribute to public policy. Shifting to a ‘digital by default’ approach to
transactional services can enable government to break down barriers, engage
cost-effectively with citizens en masse and target vital resource at those who
are not best served online. But prioritising online delivery doesn’t simply
mean digitising forms and making them available on a website — it requires a
fundamental reconsideration of how departments and processes operate.
According to a recent study of 200 councils,
visits to council websites cost just £0.15
compared to £2.83 per phone call or £8.62
per face-to-face interaction.
Source: SOCITM, 2011
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4. Rethinking IT delivery with Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a provision model whereby the IT equipment
used to support operations (such as storage, hardware, servers and networking
components) are housed, run and maintained by an outsource services provider.
This model effectively turns compute resource into a utility stream, characterised
by usage-based billing, automation of administrative tasks, dynamic scaling,
desktop virtualisation, policy-based services and internet connectivity.
In the private sector, organisations are increasingly divesting themselves of
responsibility for managing their IT infrastructure in favour of focusing on innovation
and competitive advantages such as speed to market. Enterprise-grade cloud
offerings are now a broadly-accepted replacement for, or complement to, in-house
data centres. Because IaaS turns IT costs into operational expenditure, it enables
organisations to conserve capital, align compute resource directly to business
need and focus on strategic imperatives. Crucially, IaaS extends to government IT
organisations the same opportunity as their private sector counterparts to choose
a supplier based on price, service, contract terms and brand values.
The Government’s ICT strategy, issued by the Cabinet Office in 2011, outlines a firm
agenda for data centre, network, software and asset consolidation and a concerted
shift towards cloud computing to create a common ICT infrastructure. The public
sector stands to benefit from a ‘buy not build’ approach in three primary areas:
• Reduced cost and complexity
The public sector IT purchasing landscape is characterised by an oligopoly of
large suppliers, complex contracts and cumbersome procurement processes.
Historically, this has hampered agility and transparency and has often failed to
deliver adequate value for public money.
A consumption-based model for commoditised compute resource would
enable government IT departments to provision infrastructure more flexibly and
responsively. Traditional, expensive supply agreements would be replaced by
true utility contracts. Capital expenditure on IT would be converted into more
manageable and predictable operating expenditure. ‘Care and feeding’ tasks would
be substantially reduced or eliminated altogether, liberating resource which could
be redirected at projects that drive cost savings or enhance citizen engagement.
• Greater predictability, reduced risk, accelerated delivery
Government departments have traditionally worked The government aims to achieve efficiency
independently to design, procure and run their own and financial savings of £20 million in
IT solutions, resulting in expensive and fragmented 2012-2013, £60 million in 2013-2014 and
infrastructure that frequently leads to duplication while £80 million in 2014-2015 through the
impeding the sharing and re-use of services. Some displacement of data centres in favour of
technology-based initiatives in the public sector have the Cloud.
culminated in the high-profile failure of large programmes Source: Government ICT Strategy
— many of which started with a blank sheet of paper rather Cabinet Office 2011
than proven platforms and re-usable components.
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5. Greater standardisation of IT infrastructure would eliminate
the extensive and costly design, construction and testing According to the Cabinet Office, phase 1 of
processes typically required for new projects, significantly the G-Cloud programme established that
reducing deployment timescales. IaaS provisioning can be there are now over 130 data centres and an
enacted in a matter of hours or days, rather than the lengthy additional 8,000 server rooms in central
procurement cycles involved in hardware acquisition. government alone, running an estimated
90,000 servers at average utilisation level
The use of proven building blocks and platforms would of less than 10%.
increase predictability in the way IT services are delivered,
Source: Government ICT Strategy
simultaneously reducing risk and complexity. The ability to
Cabinet Office 2011
re-use shared platforms and capabilities would generate
tangible efficiency gains by enabling government IT
departments to pay only for service integration and
customisation, rather than systems build and integration –
a key proof point of accountability for public money. The use
of open standards and open source applications would not
only reduce cost but also reduce dependencies on specific
vendors, to avoid public services being locked in
to proprietary software licensing agreements.
• Lower barriers to change
The move to a utility computing model based on an open platform supports
the Government’s aim of being able to procure interoperable solutions from
small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) rather than predominantly through large
systems integrators.
This will help to create a more competitive IT marketplace, defined by specialists
that can deliver in their domains more effectively than generic providers.
Government IT departments will no longer be locked into lengthy and restrictive
IT contracts that cannot adapt to evolving needs and circumstances.
Ultimately, the ambition is that like any utility, “infrastructure on tap” will become
taken for granted as an invisible enabler, allowing government IT departments to
focus on delivering real capability rather than low-value tasks.
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6. A hybrid approach to utility computing
This vision of a utility computing model does not demand wholesale overnight
migration to the cloud. Government data centres are typically the embodiment of
years of conflicting pressures and operational requirements. The trend towards
virtualisation has been gathering momentum for some time, leaving in its wake a
trail of complex, hybrid environments.
Now, the challenge for IT leaders is to understand when it is appropriate and
justifiable to maintain mission-critical or high-dependency IT assets in-house
and when to take advantage of a consumption-based model. Notwithstanding,
the question of whether it still makes sense to procure and manage commodity
infrastructure is becoming a moot point, particularly in the current economic climate.
However, not all utility computing providers are equal. Infrastructure-as-a-
Service should be provided according to a flexible model that lets government
departments choose which components of their IT infrastructure they continue to
own and manage, and what is more appropriately owned and managed on their
behalf. The outcome should not only support maximum cost efficiency but also
ensure the environment is optimised from a technical perspective.
To deliver on the vision for utility computing, a hybrid strategy needs to be able to
support a combination of models within a common delivery portfolio:
What? Why?
Colocation Offers government IT Delivers considerable
departments space and economies of scale, frees
power for their servers and up internal networks, can
networking equipment in the accelerate access speeds due
service provider’s data centre to increased bandwidth
Managed Provides dedicated servers Alleviates government IT
Hosting and a full suite of technical departments of virtually
support, maintenance and all administrative and
monitoring services maintenance tasks and is a
strong solution for legacy
applications
Dedicated Delivers a fully managed, Enables government IT
Cloud customisable, private cloud departments to deploy
infrastructure with dedicated, compute and storage resources
secure virtualised hosting quickly and easily when needed
Open Cloud Multi-tenanted public Compute resources can be
architecture offers a provisioned elastically without
highly flexible computing the burden of long-term
environment with the contracts or the lead-time of
scalability and security of an traditional deployments
enterprise-class platform
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7. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach often prescribed by the proponents
of pure-play cloud computing, a hybrid approach is both more realistic and
feasible to adopt, because it takes into account the diversified and often complex
composition of a typical Government data centre, which dictates the most suitable
combination of services. In a hypothetical yet very typical scenario:
• raditional hosting would be used to catch legacy services and migrate them to
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modern cloud-based delivery
• elected Government services would continue to rely on dedicated physical hosting
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• loud bursting – retaining an application within the data centre and using the
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cloud to meet demand spikes — would prevent over-provisioning by avoiding
the need to size capacity to meet peak loads
• anaged services would enable the government IT department to tap into
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technology specialists that would augment the expertise of its own staff
• olocation would help to reduce capital costs and improve availability while
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using in-house teams to run critical or sensitive workloads.
Proof Point: Giving Slough Borough Council’s data centre a
new home and a new lease of life
Challenge
Slough Borough Council relies heavily on its data centre to run more
than 179 business applications and power the website that serves
its citizens. Maintained by a staff of 27 IT professionals, the cost of
server sprawl, power and cooling was becoming uneconomical and
the premises were due for closure to make way for a school to be
located in its place.
Solution
Savvis migrated the Council’s IT infrastructure, (including web
server hardware, application software and networking equipment)
to its secure, state-of-the-art colocation facility in Slough within
just five months. The migration proceeded so smoothly that the
Council decided to colocate in another Savvis data centre for back-
up and disaster recovery services.
Benefit
Since employing Savvis’ colocation services, the Council has
experienced zero downtime. No longer spending several hours a day
on IT infrastructure maintenance and repair, the IT department is
focused on the higher value tasks involved in proactively serving its
1,200 employees and the public. With substantially reduced power,
cooling and capital costs, the Council has freed up funds to invest in
innovation to fulfil its strategic objectives.
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8. Key considerations when choosing a utility computing partner
• Single-source simplicity
Multi-sourcing to external providers who offer specific services may be
perceived as a way to diversify risk. However, in practice it generally results in
greater complexity than managing a single in-house IT team. Consider a partner
that is able to provide both traditional and cloud-based hosting capabilities,
including private, public and hybrid models.
• An enterprise-class provider
Offering a robust, scalable platform that meets the long term needs of the
government organisation is only half the story. Any eligible supplier should also
be able to fully satisfy data ownership concerns; mandate security and privacy
policies and procedures; accelerate the roll-out process; mitigate development
and deployment risks and fulfil availability and business continuity requirements.
And perhaps almost as importantly, given the aggressive targets for efficiencies,
the provider should eliminate unanticipated or unnecessary costs through up-front
consultation and rigorous planning. Furthermore, insist on an enterprise-grade
SLA that is fit for purpose and clearly stipulates availability of your critical
systems and data rather than simply uptime.
• Data sovereignty
As the government moves towards increased adoption of cloud-based services,
data sovereignty is becoming a crucial consideration. Personal information
held by the public sector must be housed within UK borders, therefore it is
imperative that any provider can meet the demand for in-country hosting rather
than offering vague assurances that data will be held in the “European region”.
Transparency and governance is key.
• A true utility contract
The supply agreement should be based on a consumption model of billing and
be explicit and transparent in its conditions. It should minimise dependence on a
specific vendor through the use of standard platforms and components, thereby
avoiding the punitive lock-in periods that have previously blighted public sector IT.
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9. • Cost-effective service
To optimise operational expenditure, consider a multi-tenant public cloud to
create a virtual private data centre in instances where dedicated infrastructure
may not be warranted. Look for a choice of SLA levels governing specific layers,
to maximise cost savings (for example, to avoid paying a premium for mission-
critical levels of availability for archive data that is rarely accessed) while retaining
the option of committed or uncontended resources for essential services.
• Seamless migration
A hybrid utility provider should work consultatively with the in-house
government IT team to determine the most appropriate approach to migration,
taking into account complexity, budget, timeframes and end-user impact,
anticipating any challenges or risks that may need to be planned for, measured,
managed or mitigated.
• Security accreditation
Shortlist providers with specialist government security teams and look for
accredited versions of core utility services as well as accredited facilities for
more traditional managed services and colocation.
• Public sector-ready
Delivering successfully to government means the provider’s services will need
to fit within the traditional public sector supply chain. Solicit evidence of assured
and accredited solutions together with availability of the gCloud Procurement
Framework and core government networks, and a guarantee of UK sovereign
services. Any prospective provider’s credentials should additionally demonstrate
a strong partner ethos and experience of working successfully with government
IT departments.
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10. In conclusion
Information technology offers the potential to change the relationship between
citizens and Government by facilitating interaction and collaboration, as well as
fulfilling the urgent fundamental remit of delivering public services at lower cost.
Making more effective use of IT affords the opportunity to enhance and innovate
the way public policy is delivered, and its impact measured and improved.
A utility computing model can clearly support these aspirations and more,
making Government IT departments more adaptable and resilient to change and
providing a reliable foundation for the adoption of new technologies and ever
more sophisticated services.
The government agenda for consolidation of data centres, networks, software
and assets is driving the shift towards cloud computing. However, not all
applications are suited to the cloud: it may not always be desirable or practical
to migrate certain types of systems or data, and specific legacy hardware and
applications may not be cloud-enabled by the original equipment manufacturer.
Instead, a hybrid approach — bringing together colocation, managed services,
private and open cloud — can offer a joined-up, cost-effective solution,
particularly when supported by a utility computing provider that takes into
individual account the maturity of the government data centre in question. One
that offers transparent, comparable pricing and simple procurement, encourages
and enables re-use of IT assets and intellectual property, and provides a clear
commercial and operational roadmap for the transition process.
Find your solution with Savvis
Governments around the world have turned to Savvis to help them achieve the
IT infrastructure they need to deliver services in the face of today’s budgetary
pressures and constantly changing environment. Savvis will help you make the
right decisions about how and where to house your data and infrastructure. Using
a blend of accredited colocation, managed hosting and public and private cloud
services, we can ensure you achieve the optimised infrastructure you’re looking
for, and the flexibility and agility your organisation demands.
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11. About Savvis
Savvis, a CenturyLink company, is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted
IT solutions for enterprises. Nearly 2,500 unique clients, including more than 30 of
the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500, use Savvis to reduce capital expense,
improve service levels and harness the latest advances in cloud computing.
For more information call us on +44(0)207 400 5600
or email emea-sales@savvis.com.
www.savvis.co.uk/government.
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12. To find out more about Savvis visit
www.savvis.co.uk/government
or call +44(0)207 400 5600.
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