Scotland's Digital Future: Data Centre Colocation In The Scottish Public Sector

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 and
• colocation.

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 in their delivery of hosting 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 some of their own servers.

This document sets out the key considerations for organisations who wish to offer colocation (hosts) to other public sector organisations and the guidance organisations seeking to colocate should consider if wishing to rent space (tenants) from them. It also describes how to use the public sector data centre colocation catalogue to find a public sector data centre that offers colocation or for an organisation to add their facility to it.