THE PROJECT

Context & Drivers

Microsoft Azure was being strongly considered as a flexible cloud technology solution that would meet a number of objectives of Lancashire County Council. These included:

• Successfully accommodating ongoing budget and cost reduction
• Avoidance of costs associated with planned and unplanned asset refreshes
• Asset and facilities disposal and/or redeployment
• Improved operational efficiencies
• Maintaining and improving internal and external service levels
• Risk mitigation and reduction

Shaping Cloud undertook a strategy engagement with the key focus of identifying a trend of cost savings across a sub set of applications.

Solution

The strategy service provided the following key deliverables to Lancashire:

• A broad  assessment of  Lancashire County Council’s applications providing a high level, assumption based analysis of feasibility to provision application services on Microsoft Azure. Each application was analysed against a set of criteria and a report produced that enabled a red, amber, green analysis of best fit versus greatest benefit.
• A focused assessment of a subset of the council’s applications providing a further level of detail around cost and benefits, for the provision of that application or service on Azure. The findings from the analysis were then presented as part of an executive presentation with supporting cost models for each of the applications investigated.

The executive presentation is aimed at both technical and non- technical personnel with the output providing a formal overview of the findings including:

• A high level, broad assessment of the applications estate, identifying challenges, risks and opportunities for a cloud based environment
• A separate section within the presentation for each of the applications assessed in more detail including a cost comparison and benefits analysis
• Summary of findings and recommended next steps

The executive presentation was an interactive and open session, providing an opportunity to ask questions around the findings and dig into more detail around the recommended next steps.

Outcomes

A set of work streams were identified as part of the strategy project with a detailed business case behind each one, an example of a work stream was migrating all web assets to Azure Platform as a Service which identified a potential saving of over £1m over a 5 year period when compared to the on-premise costs.