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

Annex 2 - Case studies

Scottish Prison Services ( SPS)

Scottish Prison Services had an ageing internal ICT facility and an unreliable expensive offsite disaster recovery function all of which created a number of risks for the organisation in terms of continuity and operations.

The nature of the organisation and the sensitivity of their data was the driver to implementing a colocation model as it also avoided the cost of upgrading the existing environment and power consumption estimated at £20m.

The solution was to host their primary facility at the Scottish Government data centre at Saughton House and their secondary facility at South Lanarkshire Council's data centre in Hamilton.

The solution reused services that were already in existence in terms of infrastructure (cooling, fire suppression systems, power etc.), security and monitoring and allowed SPS to concentrate their resources on the virtualisation of their server estate to further reduce their costs on hardware, power and licence requirements. The new architecture has also allowed the secondary site to provide more live services such as an additional live internet link and also to have fewer single points of failure.