‘Working with the Public Sector to Save Time, Money and Enhance Service with Backup and Device Management Solutions’

Paul Evans - Founder and MD of Redstor

During the last 3 party conferences we have heard much talk about how each political party is proposing to deliver cost reductions in the public sector whilst still seeming to want to preserve and enhance front line services.

This has always been the dilemma at the heart of all decision making in government and one which will be more acute in these new austere times.

There have been various government initiatives looking to achieve efficiencies in the delivery of services, notably the Gershon Review of Public Sector Efficiency which was published in July 2004. The Objective of the Review was focused on the government objective of ‘releasing major resources out of activities which could be undertaken more efficiently into front line services that meet the public’s highest priorities’. In short, how can government drive efficiency savings across public sector expenditure?

The main ways Local Authorities seem to be addressing Gershon targets are through budget savings, streamlining business processes, reducing headcount and a combination of IT and shared services.

At Redstor, over the last 4 and half years we have been successfully partnering with Local Authorities to address these very issues by helping them deliver enhanced cost effective services through innovative solutions delivering real value to the UK tax payer.

For instance Redstor’s Remote Backup Service For Schools (RBUSS) is a ‘shared service’ which is now used by over 70 Local Authorities and approximately 12,000 schools in England and Wales.

This service has raised service levels to the schools by increasing the security and availability of schools data. Lost files and information can now be recovered by the schools or Local Authority instantly at a click of a button without having to find the correct tape. School administrators no longer have to manage inefficient tape backup regimes and worry about having to take tapes offsite for disaster recovery purposes.

From the local authority point of view with RBUSS, ICT teams are fielding in some instances up to 30% less support calls in relation to backups with the consequent saving of time and money.

In one authority, one administrator is able to spend just 30 minutes a day managing the backups of 600 schools. This means that team members can be freed up from mundane tasks to focus on other priorities.

Local Authorities are saving money by leveraging the economies of scale delivered by the Redstor backup platform without losing actual control of the delivery of the backup service.

Using the Redstor Backup Platform, Local Authorities can offer a backup service to schools which is cheaper than the cost of a traditional tape based solution and which is cheaper than the cost of trying to build, manage and maintain their own platform.

Finally, the pooling of knowledge and best practice through Local Authority participation in the Redstor forums acts as a catalyst to challenge the participants to offer new services in an efficient and simple way.

Centrastage is another solution Redstor has brought to the public sector market which very much facilitates and underpins cost effective service delivery.

Centrastage is a software platform which provides device management enabling senior managers from the CEO and FD to the ICT service delivery arm to have visibility and control of the ICT estate thereby enabling efficient management.

• It facilitates the streamlining of Business and IT processes through the automation of mundane IT tasks such as patch management
• One person can manage thousands of PC's and servers by exception thereby freeing up front line headcount to concentrate on core activities
• It ensures improved availability and longevity of IT assets through consistent monitoring and proactive housekeeping
• Through its asset management capability, money can be saved by better software licence management
• It puts the public sector back in control with software vendors as software can be uninstalled and new vendor software deployed across thousands of devices at the touch of a button
• It can be run as a 'shared service' and hosted either within Government or in the 'cloud'
• Through the CentraStage user forum, Authorities are collaborating and sharing their ideas and ways of working to ensure they offer more efficient as well as new and better ICT services
• Being a customer driven shared service and benefiting from feedback in the forums, CentraStage can apply this pooled knowledge to drive down the cost of the solution and make managing every device affordable to the public sector

A demonstration of how Centrastage can save time and money can be seen in the forthcoming SQL2005 to SQL2008 upgrade which Local Authorities must carry out in many schools.

Using Centrastage, authorities have shown they can save 2-2.5 hours per primary school of administrator’s time in the upgrade process.

Assuming 90% of the 22,000 UK Primary Schools need to do the upgrade this would equate to a massive potential 49,500 hours of time saved equivalent to 27 administrators working full time for a year at a total cost of £648,000.*

This is just one tiny example of how using Centrastage can achieve Gershon objectives quickly at little cost and can help the public sector achieve on Business Transformation projects.

I will be talking more in my next blog about how Centrastage and the RBUSS service can help the public sector achieve the ‘Greening of Government ICT’ and its SOGE Targets (current Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate).

*This has assumed a 35 hour week and an average salary of £20,000 per annum plus an additional 20% levy in relation to national insurance contributions and other employment costs such as space, expenses and IT etc.