Why Choose Cloud? The Wessex Colleges Shared Services Partnership Robin Gadd, Brockenhurst College & Wessex Partnership Director

12 months feels like a long time in FE!

Wessex Education Shared Services Ltd

• VAT ‘Cost Share Group’

• New flexibility in July 2012 Finance Bill

• Addresses key constraint familiar from outsourcing & partnership working

• A Private Company limited by guarantee

• Jointly and wholly owned by its member colleges

• Employer of staff: TUPE, pensions etc

• Joint procurement and/or development of systems

Cloud: The ‘Next Big Thing’ in IT?

2009

2010

2011

2012

Ready for This?

So what’s the Problem?

• Email • Office apps • CRM • Facebook

• Developer tools • Databases • Web apps • Azure

• Storage (disk space)

• Content delivery • Backup/DR • Compute (processors,

memory)

Technology services shared and delivered over the Internet

30 Projects

6 Projects

Business Benefits of Cloud?

• Expenditure management

• Pay-per-use; shared/managed services; fewer fixed costs; elastic capacity; moving Capex → Opex; enhanced cashflow

• Quality improvement

• Getting more service/capacity; providing better services to our customers; IT getting out of the way

• Innovation and agility

• The world changes; IT changes; opportunities change; keeping up with the next big thing!

• Focussing on what we’re good at!

• Keeping what adds value, outsourcing what doesn’t, adding more value by buying-in just the services we need

Cashflow, ROI, and flexibility

£k invested

+£k invested

+£k invested

+£k invested

Elastic as demand grows (or contracts)

In-College Systems In-Cloud Systems

Wessex: Strategic Objectives for Sharing

Reduce expenditure on administrative activity across

our business support services

Enhance scale, capacity and capability for continuing

process innovation in business support services

Aligning, Standardising and Innovating Processes is the Key

Systems: from constraint to enabler

College C

College B

College A

Process Innovation Needs IT Systems Innovation

Building this in the cloud is inevitably going to be easier than trying to maintain

multiple installations across multiple college locations!

So what about the Risks?

• Our data is somewhere “out there”?

• Security; public or private cloud? is the door locked?

• Where in the world is our stuff?

• Legal jurisdictions? regulatory compliance; data protection? £-$ exchange?

• Service Level Agreements

• Service/support; uptime guarantees (with financial penalties?); technical support; time zones?

• Partners

• Trust; reliability

• Single point of failure moves elsewhere

• JANET connection: capacity/cost; redundancy?

All Manageable. But are we losing control…?

Managing the Challenges Ahead…

A February 2012 vendor survey of 270 financial directors at Further

Education colleges found over half reporting that their top goal over

the next 12 months would be 'cost-cutting' and 'increasing

efficiency' to cope with central funding cuts. 13% of institutions said they were looking at Shared

Services, with a further 11% investigating Cloud-based

solutions.

Thank you!