Isle of Man floats government IT into the cloud

Patient records, email and more held in private system

By Guardian Government Computing, 22nd September 2011

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The Isle of Man government has set up a cloud-based infrastructure for its public services, moving more than 1,000 applications including email, financial accounting, customer relationship management and health services to the service.

It was implemented over five months and involved the deployment of an EMC VPLEX virtual storage platform to federate information across multiple data centres and EMC Unified Storage. This has replaced a disc-based legacy system that was tiered in three layers, and enabled the information systems division to react more flexibly when demand for the infrastructure rises, such as during the influx of visitors for the TT motorcycle races.

Peter Clarke, the chief technology officer for the Isle of Man government, said: "By virtualising our entire server platform and all service applications, the Isle of Man government has significantly increased service levels as well as data flexibility and availability. In the case of the health service, this means individual patient records are now aggregated and appropriate information made instantly available to doctors, EMT specialists, ambulance technicians, surgeons, nurses and other authorised users."

EMC said the new infrastructure has increased data availability and system performance by a factor of eight, increased storage utilisation by 40 per cent with no increase in hardware, and reduced operating costs by 15 per cent.

This article was originally published at Guardian Government Computing. ®

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