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Why Choose Cloud? The Wessex Colleges Shared Services Partnership Robin Gadd, Brockenhurst College & Wessex Partnership Director
12 months feels like a long time in FE!
Wessex Education Shared Services Ltd
• VAT ‘Cost Share Group’
• New flexibility in July 2012 Finance Bill
• Addresses key constraint familiar from outsourcing & partnership working
• A Private Company limited by guarantee
• Jointly and wholly owned by its member colleges
• Employer of staff: TUPE, pensions etc
• Joint procurement and/or development of systems
Cloud: The ‘Next Big Thing’ in IT?
2009
2010
2011
2012
Ready for This?
So what’s the Problem?
• Email • Office apps • CRM • Facebook
• Developer tools • Databases • Web apps • Azure
• Storage (disk space)
• Content delivery • Backup/DR • Compute (processors,
memory)
Technology services shared and delivered over the Internet
30 Projects
6 Projects
Business Benefits of Cloud?
• Expenditure management
• Pay-per-use; shared/managed services; fewer fixed costs; elastic capacity; moving Capex → Opex; enhanced cashflow
• Quality improvement
• Getting more service/capacity; providing better services to our customers; IT getting out of the way
• Innovation and agility
• The world changes; IT changes; opportunities change; keeping up with the next big thing!
• Focussing on what we’re good at!
• Keeping what adds value, outsourcing what doesn’t, adding more value by buying-in just the services we need
Cashflow, ROI, and flexibility
£k invested
+£k invested
+£k invested
+£k invested
Elastic as demand grows (or contracts)
In-College Systems In-Cloud Systems
Wessex: Strategic Objectives for Sharing
Reduce expenditure on administrative activity across
our business support services
Enhance scale, capacity and capability for continuing
process innovation in business support services
Aligning, Standardising and Innovating Processes is the Key
Systems: from constraint to enabler
College C
College B
College A
Process Innovation Needs IT Systems Innovation
Building this in the cloud is inevitably going to be easier than trying to maintain
multiple installations across multiple college locations!
So what about the Risks?
• Our data is somewhere “out there”?
• Security; public or private cloud? is the door locked?
• Where in the world is our stuff?
• Legal jurisdictions? regulatory compliance; data protection? £-$ exchange?
• Service Level Agreements
• Service/support; uptime guarantees (with financial penalties?); technical support; time zones?
• Partners
• Trust; reliability
• Single point of failure moves elsewhere
• JANET connection: capacity/cost; redundancy?
All Manageable. But are we losing control…?
Managing the Challenges Ahead…
A February 2012 vendor survey of 270 financial directors at Further
Education colleges found over half reporting that their top goal over
the next 12 months would be 'cost-cutting' and 'increasing
efficiency' to cope with central funding cuts. 13% of institutions said they were looking at Shared
Services, with a further 11% investigating Cloud-based
solutions.
Thank you!