Isle of Man cuts costs with cloud computing

Isle of Man cuts costs with cloud computing

The government of the Isle of Man has managed to reduce its operating costs by 15 per cent by implementing cloud computing and virtualisation.

According to reports from Computer World, the move will allow the government's 9,000 employees to access more than 1,000 applications efficiently and reliably. Email, financial accounting, health administration and customer relationship management are among the areas to be virtualised.

EMC's VPLEX virtual storage platform and unified storage solution were chosen for the task. Peter Clarke, the government's chief technology officer, noted that analysis had shown VPLEX would reduce operating costs by 15 per cent, providing a “compelling argument” to make the switch.

He added: “By virtualising our entire server platform and all service applications, the Isle of Man Government has significantly increased service levels as well as data flexibility and availability.”

The move to cloud computing is also expected to improve the disaster recovery processes of data on the island. Mr Clarke explained that there are currently three data centres in use and these will play host to four clouds, one of which will be responsible for monitoring, which will ensure that the other servers are functioning correctly.

By employing such a flexible network of servers, the government is able to move all applications to another cloud in 30 minutes, rather than the eight hours it has taken in the past to move applications across.

To ensure the reliability enjoyed by the Isle of Man government and others, businesses and organisations would do well to look into their infrastructure to ensure their networks are up to the job.

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