Agenda item

This report outlined the strategy for provision of data centres across the three councils of Camden, Haringey and Islington and sought approval to complete the procurement exercise and award a contract for the provision of data centre services.

The Shared Digital Joint Committee had approved a report in November 2016 which detailed the benefits to sharing data centre provision. The councils agreed to: rationalise their current data centres; undertake a procurement exercise to buy data centre services from a third party; and, migrate to the new service provider.

Under Haringey’s Constitution, awards of contracts estimated at £500,000 or above are classified as a  key decision. Also under the Council’s Protocol for Key Decisions officers are prohibited from taking key decisions. Key decisions may only be taken in accordance with Cabinet Procedure Rules. Therefore the Cabinet Member for Corporate Resources considered the report and

RESOLVED

1.    To approve the procurement strategy endorsed by the SD Management Board for the procurement of data centre services through a third party supplier via a framework agreement; and,

2.    To award a contract for the provision of data centre services to Crown Hosting Data Centre Limited.

3.    That the Chief Digital and Information Officer provide a report to the Shared Digital Management Board once the final contract value has been ascertained setting out the year on year savings.

4.    To note that the five year total contract value will be in the region of £4.5m, apportioned across all three councils based on services that each council consume and the final contract cost to be confirmed once the actual level of provision and data migration has been confirmed.

Reasons for decision

The councils each have in-house provision for data centres currently.  There are issues with maintaining the hardware for the data centres with hardware coming to end of life, and needing replaced. These costs are duplicated across all three councils and can be reduced through consolidating data centre provision.

By moving to third party provision of data centres, the councils can expect to see a drop in cost of service based on the 2015/16 operating costs of approximately £400,000 per year whilst improving business continuity through improved resilience and better disaster recovery.  The savings will be realised through a reduction in the number of staff required to manage the service, which will be subject to consultation and also lower hosting costs as the councils will only pay for services used.

By co-locating services, and moving to a new data centre provider will reduce the councils’ environmental impact.  Existing hardware is end of life, consumes more power, and emits more heat.  Using new data centre technology the power consumption and levels of heat emitted will be reduced.

Additionally, a standard set of facilities across all three councils would enable better control of each data centre’s set-up and design.  This is particularly relevant when considering the security design, ensuring that the councils can keep up to date with new security requirements, building on the recent penetration testing audit’s findings.

Each council has an accommodation strategy to dispose of under utilised sites.  Co-locating the data centres into a third party’s sites would free up further accommodation space, aligning to the existing accommodation strategy.

This programme will directly contribute to the medium term financial strategy by delivering savings on the current cost of service.

It supports better engagement with residents and local communities by improving the availability of digital services, with service availability guaranteed to 99.98% leading to fewer incidences of loss of service. By improving accessibility to the services available from the data centres staff will be better placed to make informed decisions on issues raised with them by residents

Alternative options considered

Three options for data centre provision were considered:

1) do nothing – retain existing data centres;

2) retain service in-house, upgrade infrastructure; and,

3) procure through another service provider.

The tablebelow provides an evaluation of each option:

*Partial the in house data centre option could be scaled but there is an upper limit due to power capacity and physical space available within the site.

Based on the criteria and assumptions noted above it is recommended that the council seeks data centre provision through a third party as this option most fully meets the councils’ needs.