Isle of Man's G-Cloud work starting to bear real fruit

The Isle of Man has slashed more than half a million pounds off its annual operating costs after rolling out a Cloud-based technology infrastructure for more efficient and reliable delivery of public services.

 

Since it went live at the end of last year, the Isle of Man government has shaved £250,000 in operating costs and a further saving of £290,000 through streamlined administration and automation, it has just announced. In addition to cost savings, its version of a local G-cloud project has reduced provisioning times for new network and service availability from 90 days to less than one.

 

Working with supplier Unisys, the island has implemented a Cloud-based technology infrastructure for more efficient, flexible and reliable delivery of its public services. The project provides 24/365 access to all applications, including online services, for the island’s 80,000 citizens.

 

Within the hybrid environment, Private Cloud services are utilised across Manx’s nine governmental Departments and 12 statutory boards and commissions, alongside public cloud services for email and security events monitoring.

 

Allan Paterson, Director of Information Systems, Isle of Man Government, repeated his aim: free up budget to support enhanced public services: “We’ve cut our average cost per server by £1,800, allowing us to focus more IT spend on service delivery rather than operations.

 

“Provisioning time and the associated costs have also been dramatically reduced by our new virtualised environment – moving from a distributed model to shared infrastructure services. This has enabled more than 1,000 services to be delivered quickly and easily to our Departments and citizens,” Paterson added.