A secure, cost-neutral solution

The Council’s security concerns were addressed by ensuring the correct standards and accreditations were put in place as part of the process; they also wanted their data hosted in the UK and Europe. One other concern was how the Council would fare switching from a CAPEX to an OPEX model for financing, and how best to manage that. For the Isle of Wight Council it worked out well; because they could decommission some functionality as a result of the migration, it was cost-neutral.

“We were faced with a £600 000 - £700 000 hardware investment that would have fixed our hardware challenge, but wouldn’t have solved any of our challenges around versioning and upgrade patches, limited resilience, knowledge base or capacity to develop. Moving to the cloud in this way opened up a lot of options. We now have all of the enhancement packs, better disaster recovery options and resilience of the systems - which is a huge bonus.”

- Gavin Muncaster, Strategic Manager of ICT & Digital Services, Isle of Wight Council

Cost-effective support

“Compared to a lot of bigger organisations, we have a small in-house support team. We really weren’t equipped to get the most out of the product as it was. There are huge benefits to having essentially a whole support team in EPI-USE Labs, which just didn’t make sense to have in-house.”

- Dean Finlayson, Corporate Application Development Lead, Isle of Wight Council

A close partnership

“A lot of companies offer a partnership arrangement and promise to listen to your concerns. Unfortunately, often that is just ‘sales talk’. But with EPI-USE Labs, their communication has been very good and we have actually built a close rapport; we have been in regular contact both before and since go-live. That good relationship has continued.”

- Dean Finlayson, Corporate Application Development Lead, Isle of Wight Council