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Bristol council in a hurry with £250,000 cloud migration project
Local authority seeks IT supplier to help it move systems to the cloud in nine-month project before colocation service ends
Bristol City Council has begun an urgent push to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud over the next nine months, as its incumbent datacentre colocation provider winds down its business.
The migration must start on 5 March 2018, the council confirmed in a tender document, with a provisional completion date of 25 November. It is part of a wider effort by the local authority to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of its IT estate.
“This [November 2018] is our critical date,” the council document states. “Beyond March 2019, our datacentre partner will no longer have a colocation service offering, therefore the timescale for completion of this work package is a significant constraint for Bristol City Council.”
The council said it needs to move a “significant number” of its internal systems and databases to the cloud ahead of this date, and is seeking an IT supplier to help with the work.
“We need to ensure that the [council’s] systems are reliably hosted beyond the cut-off date with our existing datacentre supplier, and that the new infrastructure in optimised in terms of cost and performance,” the document said.
The council has already taken steps in its IT migration process, including a “soft market test undertaken with nine suppliers to establish anticipated timeframes, lead- in times and indicative costs”. As a result of this, it estimates the work will cost between £180,000 and £250,000.
It has also set up an in-house cloud migration team, brought the management of its IT servers on-premise and created an overview of the cloud platform to discuss with its new partner supplier.
Read more about cloud migration
- Judith Myerson explains the security risks that companies should be aware of when moving IT infrastructure to the cloud.
- The challenges organisations face when moving to the cloud and how they can avoid downtime during the migration process.
- Why the traditional ‘lift-and-shift’ approach is no longer the best way to move from a datacentre to the cloud.
The council said in the document that it needs partners with a track record of this type of migration with large public-sector organisations that can ensure compliance with the latest regulations. It also said some of its systems are already in the cloud.
“The successful bidder will also need to work with the suppliers of the infrastructure and users of systems that are migrated to cloud,” it said.
The council will judge applications for the contract based on the quality of their initial pitch, value for money, how they have assessed potential risks and how they can scale their workforce.
Computer Weekly has approached Bristol City Council and was awaiting further comment at the time of writing. ..................................... ............................................................................................
