I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding your council’s IT infrastructure, with a specific focus on data storage and cloud adoption. Please provide responses to the following questions:
1. Data Centres and On-Premise Facilities
1a. How many data centres, server rooms, or similar on-premise facilities are currently operated or managed by the council?
2.
1b. Please provide a breakdown of each type.
1 on premise and 1 Disaster Recovery site.
2. Data Storage
2a. What is the breakdown of the council’s data stored across the following environments?
Please provide either the percentage or numerical breakdown for each type:
– On-premise
– Public cloud
– Private cloud
– Hybrid (a mix of on-premise and cloud)
On-premise – 54%
Public cloud – 34%
Private cloud – 0%
Hybrid (a mix of on-premise and cloud) – 12%
3. Cloud Migration
3a. Has the council migrated any data or services to the cloud in the past three years?
No systems have moved from on-premise to the cloud in the last 3 years. We have seen an increase in the Cloud applications moving to single sign on.
3b. If applicable, can you provide a list of systems migrated (e.g., HR, CRM, Finance, etc.)?
N/A.
3c. If applicable, please could you provide the cloud service provider(s) used for each migration?
N/A.
4. Cloud Adoption Policy
4a. Does the council have a formal cloud adoption policy?
Please refer to this document for information.
5. Cloud Data Location Monitoring5a. Does the council monitor the physical location of its cloud-hosted data (answer yes or no)?
Yes.
5b. If applicable, please can you provide how this is tracked?
N/A.
6. Financial Information on IT Infrastructure
6a. For the past five years, can you provide the annual spend on your IT Infrastructure?
6b. If applicable, please provide the breakdown of spend for each year of the last 3 years and for each of the following categories:
– Hardware (Servers, Computers, Network Devices, Storage Systems)
– Software
– Networks
– Data Centres
– Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
– Security Systems
– IT Service Management
– External consultancy for cloud migration or IT modernisation
For question 6a/6b, compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. This assessment is based on annual spend on IT Infrastructure being spread across several different budget lines for each of the five years requested. Some of the spend items are also a mix between infrastructure and other IT services. On top of this, to then further break down this spend into the categories specified in 6b for each year of the last 3 years adds further complexity to this task. It is the Devon County Council (DCC) Finance Department that would be responsible for sifting and collating the data for question 6a/6b, followed by analysis work between DCC Finance and DCC IT. It is the DCC Finance Department’s assessment that the time needed to fulfil this task would exceed the 18 hours of combined officer time.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the amount of financial data requested and the way it is recorded this is not possible for this request.