AlwaysON’s securely hosted services could become a pillar for UK councils

Sept. 29, 2010 - PRLog -- AlwaysON’s securely hosted services could become a pillar for UK councils
In the midst of public sector spending cuts and ongoing recovery from the economic down-turn, county councils are becoming ever more conscious of their capital expenditure and therefore streamlining costly IT operations. Councils in the UK have announced this week that they are to begin outsourcing to drive down costs, in a move that could include their IT departments.

Suffolk and Brighton councils are taking steps to form “virtual” authorities that outsource all but a handful of services to external companies. The council hopes offloading services could shave 30% off its £1.1bn budget, as part of the government's drive to reduce the fiscal deficit.

Though the majority of these services will not involve their IT departments, AlwaysON (the leading bespoke managed services provider) is advising the councils to consider further savings by having their business e-mail hosted or perhaps deploying Unified Communications solutions in order to cut down on unnecessary travel expenses and related costs.  

A spokesman for Brighton Council told the Guardian that the new services will share costs, as it looks to save £45 million by 2013-14.

"This new structure aims to deliver quality and innovation that squeezes out cost, duplication and looks for opportunities to collaborate with others both inside and outside the council and the city to share costs," a council spokesman said.

AlwaysON’s experience in deploying and hosting secure managed services for leading government bodies such as Ofsted, provides the possibility for many councils and local authorities cost effective installation of Hosted Exchange 2007 and Unified Communications. This effectively allows business to go on as usual but with a considerable saving and added benefits
Hosted email allows organizations to maintain an email system without paying to maintain and manage it on-site.
Unified Communications allows free inhouse calls, data sharing, presence management, remote working, document and screen sharing and many other benefits included on top of the cost saving.
“All this is provided via a secure and fully managed private MPLS network allowing sensitive and private information to remain private” an AlwaysON spokesman said.

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AlwaysON (www.alwayson.co.uk) is a secure MPLS Managed Network provider enabling location and remote site/worker connectivity for the transmission of data, video and voice traffic. AO implements, hosts and manages Unified Communication.