Unisys UK Helps Isle of Man Government

Unisys Corporation announced that its UK subsidiary has completed a data center transformation project for The Isle of Man Government.

The government’s modernized IT environment has delivered multiple cost savings to date and reduced provisioning times for new network and service availability – from 90 days to less than one.

The solution was designed and delivered on budget by Unisys to underpin the Isle of Man’s public service initiative to transform public services and provide 24/365 access to all applications, including online services, for the island’s 80,000 citizens. The project started in the fourth quarter of 2010 and was delivered within 12 months without additional capex. The new technology enabled the government to identify savings in opex and as a result should cover its delivery costs and provide ongoing savings for the Government over the next five years.

The Isle of Man Government’s IT infrastructure is now a hybrid cloud environment, where Unisys private cloud services are utilized across its nine departments, and 12 statutory boards and commissions, alongside public cloud services for email and security events monitoring.

Peter Clarke, chief technology officer, Isle of Man Government, says: "Making the most of public spending is as important on the Isle of Man as elsewhere in the UK. As a result of the IT transformation project we have phased out $854,000 of costs per annum, including $395,000 in operating costs and $458,000 through streamlined administration and automation. Servers can be delivered in one day where previously it took between 30 and 60 days. Obviously, the savings this environment has delivered, and will achieve in the future, gives us added stability at a time of economic pressure. We believe our model could be scaled up and replicated across the UK public sector with similarly powerful results."

In addition to enhancing public services, the project provides the government with an infrastructure for its 8,000 staff, spread across 361 locations. This includes hospitals, GP surgeries, schools and the island’s central government services. To achieve this, Unisys modernized and consolidated legacy applications on a cloud platform based on Unisys enterprise servers, Microsoft virtualization technology and VPLEX-enabled EMC Unified Storage and virtual storage technology.

"Our aim is to free up budget to support enhanced public services and we are reducing our unit cost all the time," explains Allan Paterson, director of information systems, Isle of Man Government. "We’ve cut our average cost per server by $2,800, 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 virtualized 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. We believe in the maxim that IT needs to enable the business, rather than drive it, and working with Unisys has allowed us to do that."

The project has also been recognized
for its environmental impact and awarded:

• Energy Champion Award for the Biggest Energy Savings in the Public Sector.
• Best Virtualisation Project of 2010 by Techworld.com
• Finalist for the Datacentre Dynamics Leaders Award 2011.

Rob Chapman, managing director for UKMEA at Unisys, says: "Maximizing the efficiency of public sector projects is a priority for governments around the world and we are delighted to have been a key supplier in this successful project for Isle of Man Government. It is a test case for how virtual and cloud-based infrastructure can reduce capital and operational cost, free-up staff time and enhance the availability and delivery of public services."

The Isle of Man Government’s virtualization initiative, Transforming Government, was pre-empted by the JUPITER project – or Joined UP IT for the Electronic Resident – which ran from 2003 to 2006 and was tasked with consolidating and enhancing back-office systems and public services, including single electronic patient records, online payments and bus ticketing.