The council already benefits from an award-winning on-premise private cloud solution from ANS, but will now also extract value from the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform.
As well as additional scalability and flexibility to accommodate future growth, the council is now benefiting from digital capabilities only available through hyper-scale cloud platforms, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics. The council and its customers now have the capability to gain deep business intelligence, predicting future demand for services such as how many school places are needed in specific regions.
The project has seen ANS implement the core capability for the platform and deliver a secure, efficient and production-ready environment. ANS has also supported the council in moving a number of applications into Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, providing a significant reduction in operational overheads and maximising the benefits of the migration. These applications underpin a range of consumer-facing digital services and users will now enjoy an even faster and more efficient experience.
Salford City Council also offers managed services to a range of third-party organisations including The Landing at MediaCityUK, a leading Northern tech hub. The additional capabilities provided by public cloud will enable the council to offer state-of-the-art, digital services to its ever-growing customer base.
The council’s security and disaster recovery capabilities have improved too, with public cloud’s geographical redundancy minimising the threat of downtime, while Microsoft Azure’s Advanced Threat Protection capabilities provide sophisticated security and defence services.
Jon Burt, corporate infrastructure architect at Salford City Council said: “We aim to be forward-thinking when it comes to our technology choices and vision, and we look for partners to match. We’ve worked with ANS for over five years and the team has a complete understanding of both our broad commercial objectives and the intricacies of our IT infrastructure.
“They are the cloud experts and have been with us every step of the way on our cloud journey.”
This partnership follows the news that ANS has been awarded the Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency Certification, which demonstrates ANS Group’s ‘best-in-class’ ability and commitment to helping customers migrate and advance their digital business applications in Microsoft Azure.
Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS Group, said: “Salford City Council is a leader in its sector and remains ahead of the curve when it comes to providing digital services. The capabilities provided by public cloud are crucial for any organisation looking to achieve more in today’s world, and in this instance the Microsoft Cloud was the right decision for the council – it’s future-proofed a number of important elements while delivering an improved user experience.”
