Date: Monday 12 December 2011

Time: 12.30 - 16.30

Venue: TBC

City: Central London

 
Workshop summary

There is growing interest in many organisations in substituting external for in-house ICT provision. There are many options for this, ranging from collaborative solutions between a few organisations (e.g. a shared data centre; mutual back-up) through larger scale but closed collaborations (e.g. private clouds) to commercial hosting or cloud solutions. The potential benefits are any or all of improved performance, new capabilities, reduced cost and a lighter environmental footprint. However, assessing the sign and scale of these benefits, and comparing between different solutions (including retaining IT capability in-house), is difficult because a lot of key information is hidden or not available. In particular, economic comparisons are difficult because many IT departments don’t know the full costs of delivering the services which could potentially be outsourced. One particular absence is that of energy costs, and the associated expenditure on cooling and power supply equipment. Few IT departments are aware of this because they do not pay the bills (which are typically paid by Facilities). As cooling and power supply-related costs account for a third of the operating costs of Amazon Web Services, there is clearly not a level playing field for decision making. Other ‘tilting’ factors include VAT (usually payable on external solutions but not internal ones), accounting policies, and space (non) charging. This free workshop aims to change this situation by: 

• Identifying the key elements which need to be addressed in making good business and environmental cases for external ICT solutions;
• Highlighting the main barriers to objective decision-making about internal/external choices and how they can be overcome;
• Creating an action agenda for organisations and policy makers wanting to create a more level playing field for IT decision making.

The workshop originates from the higher education sector (where these topics are very much on the agenda) but the discussions are very relevant to others. It has been organised by two projects - Responsible Energy Costs, led by Forum for the Future, and Green IT for Science, led by the University of Bradford. Both are funded by JISC, the support body for ICT in HE, and associated with HEEPI’s SusteIT project.

To book a place at the workshop

Programme

Time  

Activity 

12.30 – 13.00 
Registration & Refreshments (No lunch) 

13.00 – 13.20  
Introduction – Making Good Business and Environmental Cases for Internal/External Choices
Martin Bennett, RECSO Project Leader, and Peter James, Green IT for Science Project Leader  

13.20 – 14.00
Practical Issues in Cloud Evaluation by Universities
Dan Perry, Title, JANET (UK)
NB JANET is a not-for-profit provider of network and other services (including cloud brokerage) to educational bodies 

14.00 – 14.40 
Presentation tbc
Presenter tbc  

14.40 – 15.00 
Refreshments

15.00 – 15.40
Presentation tbc
Presenter tbc

15.40 – 16.15
Discussion/Final Q&A

16.15 (approx)
End