Two English councils sign up to Azure for six years in £35m reseller deal as ERP project faces delays, ballooning costs

Two local authorities in northwest England have awarded reseller Insight Direct a six-year £35m contract for Microsoft licences and cloud services. Cheshire East and Cheshire West and Chester Councils have teamed up to "adopt and consume Microsoft Azure SaaS/PaaS and other cloud-hosted services and products" under the deal. …

[Anonymous Coward]

Six year contract?

They seem to have missed the main point of "cloud" - the turn on / turn off flexibility. If you're committing to six years of use, you may as well put equipment in your own data centres for a fraction of the cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Six year contract?

It's in to use 'clouds' they say its cheaper.

Yeah, it's only good for small companies without the budget to buy and host their own stuff. Or when your load requirements fluctuate massively that you will have under utilised hardware for significant periods of time. This last one can be due to seasonal changes or because your business has uncertainty in its client base (start ups).

The last being you wish to have global resiliency without upfront colo and hardware cost.

I do not see any of these needs with this.

[AMBxx]

Re: Six year contract?

Doesn't he six year contract cover actually migrating stuff too?

Azure also gives hefty discounts if you commit for over a year

[hoola]

Re: Six year contract?

This will be the Microsoft Azure sales people doing the hard sell with a load of fictitious "facts" that it will be costing the Council £100k/year for each or 20 people to manage 100TB of storage and 250 servers.

This bull gets touted around at C level all the time and people just lap it up believing every word. It never appears to occur to them that they don't have that many staff or are paying that much (including all the on-costs).

You get what you deserve and the Azure hard sell too often bypasses reality. Once they actually find out the real costs they cannot go back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Six year contract?

All the cheap stuff to look after and maintain, were the first services to be moved to the sky water.

[AMBxx]

Chester Council

I had a meeting with Chester Council years ago. The meeting room doubled as a nuclear shelter. Big sign on the wall saying that in the event of nuclear war, we'd all have to leave as the room was reserved for the Mayor and council!

[Wilhelm Schickhardt]

GDPR Compliant Alternatives

OnlyOffice out of Riga.

NextCloud out of Stuttgart.

Run the server in a British Data Centre, not in a US controlled one.

Create British jobs and support your European friends.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: GDPR Compliant Alternatives

I take your point but there are two Microsoft data centres in the UK and plenty of UK based data centres to choose from if you wish.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: GDPR Compliant Alternatives

"there are two Microsoft data centres in the UK"

There's also the CLOUD Act.

[gerryg]

"only works on"

It makes my heart sink whenever I read that phrase especially in the context of public finance. Does no-one in the public sector ever learn anything about the need for open standards?

[Al fazed]

No wonder

it is so expensive to live in Cheshire.

I guess it's going to get even more costly over the next six years possibly.........

Does any council in the UK have an IT person on their Management Committee ?

ALF

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former Agilisys employee, seeing the final paragraph of this article does not surprise me. They are a terrible company to work for and bleed their customers for as much money as possible whilst delivering a poor service. Why any company would choose to work with then is beyond me.