Scotland's Digital Future: Scottish Public Sector Data Centre Virtualisation Guidance

Introduction

Scotland's Digital Future: Delivery of Public Services set out an objective of developing a national strategy for the public sector's data storage focusing on consolidation and re-use. This reflected a recommendation of the Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland report by John McClelland which suggested that significant efficiency and energy savings could be achieved through consolidation.

The Data Hosting and Data Centre Strategy for the Scottish Public Sector sets out how we will deliver on that overall objective and in particular how the public sector will adopt the following approaches for achieving significant efficiency and energy savings:

• cloud computing
• virtualisation
• co-location.

In assessing the current approach and environments for data hosting we found that organisations face many options in making arrangements for data hosting but:

• lack both an overall vision and information base for doing so, and
• need guidance on how the Scottish public sector can best utilise existing facilities for services that are not cloud ready e.g. legacy systems

The decision roadmap in the data hosting and data centre strategy sets out what organisations should consider in terms of new investment or change to the delivery or hosting of services. While externally hosted cloud computing is a priority option in the overall strategy, it may still be necessary in the short term for some organisations to manage their own data centres.

This document provides the guidance and principles for how Scotland's public sector can utilise virtualisation technologies.