IT Datacentres: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/19/00981  
Date received:  03/04/2019
Date responded: 23/04/2019

 

You asked for information regarding Scottish Government IT Datacentres.

 

1. The Scottish Government operates from two data centres.
2. One - the primary data centre is owned by Scottish Government.
3. The reports noted below were commissioned to ascertain the suitability and sustainability of the data centres, they are not available for public viewing.

 

Primary Data Centre :
2008 Feasibility Study
2014 Review of Current Building Services Tier Rating
2016 Condition Survey Report of Mechanical and Electrical Assets

Secondary Data Centre :
2008 Assessment and Recommendation Report
2008 Data Centre Site Review Report
2008 Survey Report - IT Security

 

Primary and Secondary Data Centre :
2018 Cloud First Hosting Strategy

 

4. The primary data centre currently provides co-location facilities for 14 public sector organisations.

5. The breakdown of customers within the primary data centre is Scottish Government 40%, Other Public Sector 25%, spare capacity 35%.

6. Four customers have reduced their rack space in the past 5 years.

7. Three customers have increased their rack space in the past 5 years.

8. Apart from normal operating and maintenance there is no planned investment in the primary data centre.

 

9. A consultants report was commissioned by Scottish Government to assess all existing ICT services and to produce a Cloud First Hosting Strategy. The report included various options and costs for migrating existing services to the cloud and where necessary the relocation of hardware to third party data centres. It also included a road map showing how this could be achieved in a more cost effective manner by adopting a phased approach over the next few years, as to do so in the immediate short term proved to be financially unviable.

10. The Cloud First Hosting Strategy report demonstrated that the present mix of services and platforms they run on make it more cost effective for Scottish Government to operate its own data centre. This situation is expected to change over the course of the next 2 to 3 years as technology refresh exercises are completed, and new services are developed in the cloud, causing a reduction of our data centre footprint. Consequently the economic viability of operating a Scottish Government data centre will diminish.

 

 

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