Royal Mail saves 10-15% on maintenance each year

[clashcityrocker]

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Adopting cloud technology has given Royal Mail the ability to scale up and down quickly to meet demand, without paying a premium.

Difficult times call for drastic measures. So it is that Royal Mail, by its own admission a very conservative organisation, is blazing a trail in cloud computing.
Facing the threats of increased competition and privatisation, the national postal service is under growing pressure to operate more efficiently. For the IT department, the challenge is even greater. Without a flexible, scalable IT infrastructure, there is a limit to how dynamic the company can be.
So the Royal Mail looked into the cloud option - when it was very much ”bleeding edge”, notes Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure management. “It was 2008 and we were entering the recession. We were looking for rapid modernisation.”
Although it had an external service provider running its IT systems from a data centre, flexibility to adjust the terms of the agreement was limited. The company needed to scale and adapt its IT systems more dynamically, without paying a premium. Royal Mail has swapped an old, on-premise Lotus Notes office application for a flexible, modern solution (Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite - BPOS) which is hosted in the cloud. Servers, software, storage and bandwidth are supplied on demand, so Royal Mail pays only for resources it consumes. When staff numbers rise by 20pc for the Christmas rush, the systems are scaled up - then switched off in January.
Over its four-year contract, it will save 10-15pc on maintenance as it no longer owns the IT systems; these are the responsibility of Microsoft and CSC, Royal Mail’s broader IT service provider.

Security and compliance is not a major issue, Mr Steel adds. Royal Mail began conservatively; reaping the benefits of the cloud for office applications while keeping more sensitive material in house.
Now Mr Steel’s team has opted for another of Microsoft’s solutions, Hyper-V, for more sensitive line-of-business applications such as order processing. This provides a private cloud environment, with the advantages of cloud computing such as flexibility and scalability, while keeping sensitive data on premise and under direct control.
“Importantly, we can seamlessly move applications in and out of the cloud as and when we choose,” Mr Steel says. “In terms of its importance, cloud computing is right up there with the internet itself. It has given us a foundation to adapt and change so, whatever the future holds, we are ready. Decisions are infinitely quicker now.”

[rmdriver]

Cloud cuckoo land more like. What a partnership Microsoft and RM.

[fishtank]

Decisions are infinitely quicker now.

They are still the wrong decisions...but they are infinitely quick wrong decisions now.

[Royal_Fail]

Short term gain and long term reliance on outside expertise and microsoft

[dvbuk55]

Decisions are infinitely quicker now.

They are still the wrong decisions...but they are infinitely quick wrong decisions now.

Yep they come thick and fast..................they aren't spotted as wrong any quicker though - so the end result is pretty much the same