Taking Norfolk schools into the cloud

Norfolk County Council Children's Services is taking to the clouds with BT's Virtual Data Centre service. It will help the service manage their ICT overheads by moving applications, storage and security into the cloud, removing the need for physical hardware. It will also free up resources, enabling learning services to be provided to over 100,000 pupils and students in more than 400 schools across Norfolk.




As an automated and scalable service, the Virtual Data Centre will let Norfolk County Council Children's Services to add and remove applications easily, and in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. The council will be moving to a model which requires no up-front capital expenditure. By making the most of the latest virtualisation technology, Norfolk County Council Children's Services will reduce their physical space and power requirements in the data centre, resulting in a reduction in carbon emissions.




Paul Fisher, assistant director of education for Norfolk County Council, said: "We considered all of the traditional options for this type of service, but we chose BT's Virtual Data Centre because it has the lowest total cost of ownership, lowest risk and most flexibility. It also meets two of our highest priorities in public sector spending constraints and reducing our carbon footprint."




Many other BT customers are already enjoying these advantages. A large UK financial institute has reduced its 22 production systems to just four virtual servers, with a physical infrastructure saving of 20%. A global financial enterprise was able to scale down from 700 servers to just 100, generating expected savings of 50% with pay-back within a year.




Could moving some of your services to a Virtual Data Centre be the right answer for you? To help you assess how your organisation can benefit, BT are offering free one-day business case workshops, a one-month service try before you buy and free consultancy services to help you migrate from your current environment.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• cloud computing
• norfolk schools
• education