The problem

Staffordshire County Council is the eighth-largest council in England and a leader in shared IT services. It wanted to benefit from management and virtualisation to save money and ensure continuity of critical applications, while creating a private cloud environment to extend shared services.
Staffordshire IT services need to cut the cost of its existing physical server infrastructure. They need to improve availability and disaster recovery, as they currently have more than 200 virtual machines across its two data centres.

The benefits

Staffordshire can now enter more shared services partnerships and can accurately bill for underlying services. New server provisioning now takes seconds and only five to 10 minutes to be fully on the domain, with no disruption to the organisation.
• Cost effective

• System Center products can manage the applications as well as the virtual machines

• Now possible to bill shared services partners accurately

• Comprehensive client management across physical, mobile, and virtual environments

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