Move Bristol Council IT to the Cloud

Bristol Council currently spend £2.4 million on provision of communication and IT services to its 7,000 staff.  (See http://bit.ly/brizitspend)   This could be done far more cheaply by moving some of the services to the cloud.  

Bristol Council do not seem to know how much money they spend on Basic IT services but they do say that they spend £2.4 million overall.  Let's err on the side of caution and assume that only £1million is spent on basic IT services per year.

A cloud based service such as Google Apps would cost £210,000 per year.  Based on our assumption, this would represent a saving of £790,000 per annum.  That would make a significant different to the large hole in Bristol's budget.

More information on Google Apps: http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/apps/business/

We would be able to make a more accurate estimate of the cost savings achievable if BCC would respond to the FoI: http://bit.ly/brizitspend 

Hillingdon council have done this and are expecting to save £3 million over 4 years: http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/index.jsp?articleid=24216