THE PROJECT
Context and Drivers
As Microsoft Gold partners, Shaping Cloud were introduced to Oxfordshire County Council by Microsoft to explore the opportunities presented by Microsoft Azure for its core applications and IT services.
Cloud technologies were being strongly considered as a flexible technology solution that could meet many objectives of Oxfordshire County Council, including to:
- Accommodate ongoing budget and cost reduction
- Avoid costs associated with planned and unplanned asset refresh
- Carry out an asset and facilities disposal and/or redeployment
- Improve operational efficiencies
- Maintain and improve internal and external service levels
- Mitigate risk and ensure ‘right-sizing’ in IT operations
- Ensure the agile flexing up and down of IT services to meet the needs of business users
- Support the business and overall IT transformation programmes being defined within Oxfordshire County Council.
Solution
Shaping Cloud undertook its SC:Strategy consultancy engagement to explore and quantify the benefits of a move to Azure Cloud Services.
SC:Strategy met the requirements of Oxfordshire County Council by providing a rapid understanding of solution dependencies and considerations; the applications that would be best-fit for moving to cloud services; capital and revenue costs for the migration and management of a subset of those applications; and how to take advantage of cloud to de-risk services and make operational efficiencies.
This is a consultancy and architecture process that maps the needs of service users along with testing prototype solutions and getting early feedback.
With planning completed, Shaping Cloud could begin the next phase, collaborating with the internal teams to create a new target operating model to realise the benefits identified in the project.
Outcomes
In its assessment of the business case for Oxfordshire County Council to move to Azure cloud services, the SC:Strategy report identified:
- 270 Virtual Machines that could be eligible for migrating onto Azure IaaS
- 160 Web Servers which could be moved onto Azure PaaS, delivering significant cost savings
- 250 Applications, many of which could be migrated to lower the cost of delivery
