HERTSMERE Council is to spend £69,000 to move its IT systems to a public ‘cloud’.

In November the council approved some funding for a public ‘cloud’ hosted disaster recovery solution, as well as a ‘business continuity facility’ in Potters Bar.

This week the council’s executive committee approved the additional spend for a system that would migrate services to a public cloud provider – not only for use in the event of a disaster, but on a day to day basis.

Councillors were told that, once up and running, the system would mean services would be available from any location.

And in the event of a major incident – for example, loss of access to the Civic Offices – services would still be available from other locations.

As servers and on site storage devices would no longer need to be replaced, it is estimated that the one-off cost could save the Council around £25,000 a year.

Commenting on the decision a spokesman for Hertsmere Borough Council said: “In November full Council approved funding for the procurement of a public cloud hosted disaster recovery solution and the build of a business continuity facility at the Waste Depot at Potters Bar.

“As part of this project, we worked with the Society of IT Managers (SOCITM) to review our current IT infrastructure and technical capabilities and capacities.

“SOCITM recommended that we change our approach to disaster recovery from a disaster recovery centric model where IT processing capacity remains on HBC premises but is ‘backed up’ to a public cloud, to a production centric model where we migrate business critical systems to a public cloud provider.

“The rationale for this is if staff can access a system hosted in the cloud from the Civic Offices they will be able to (with security settings) to access it from any location including the business continuity facility at Potters Bar.

“We anticipate that we will end up with a hybrid cloud infrastructure that is a mix of on premise and cloud servers. This will evolve over three to five years.

“The £69,000 is for the migration of our key business systems to the cloud, train our staff in migrating systems to the cloud and up skilling them to manage a cloud environment.”