Application Shared Services Transition Audit
The Shared Services initiative is derived from the Transformational Government strategy aimed at increasing productivity & efficiency via the reorganising of assets and the sharing of capital investments with similar organisations. Business processes, IT Infrastructure & annual maintenance contracts are likely to be duplicated across different organisations and, therefore, the sharing of services in the UK Public Sector on a regional or even national level could reduce costs to enable greater expenditure on improving public services.
The scope of the UK Public Sector consists of over 1,300 organisations including Departments, NDPB’s, Agencies, Local Authorities, Police and Primary Care Trusts. Net Consulting have focused their ‘Application Shared Services Transition Audit’ on three sector groups, namely, Health, Education & Local Government.
Sharing Application Services
Consolidation and co-location initiatives offer significant savings in licensing costs & management overhead and then the more obvious savings in local datacentre space and power consumption. The Application Shared Services Transition Audit is specifically concerned with consolidation and co-location initiatives where existing applications or servers are to be redeployed, for example, into shared Local Government datacentres or regional University server farms.
The Challenge
The problem is that relocating an application to a remote datacentre can result in catastrophic user response times. Some applications were never designed to run over any type of network other than a LAN, and when even a slightly slower campus network or WAN is introduced, the smal additional delays can have a large cumulative effect. Having a method of determining the expected service performance in advance would mitigate a great deal of risk and potentially avoid an outright service failure.
The Solution
Net Consulting can predict the end-user response times of applications over varying WAN conditions using a range of technology tools. An Application Shared Services Transition Audit will clearly identify how well key applications will perform, further informing the decision on which services are suitable for relocation, and which should remain locally based. The audit service can offer a network capacity planning element which analyses dataflows between client & server, to provide accurate usage patterns. This information would then be fed into a software network model to determine bandwidth requirements.
Service Benefits
- Clear indication of which services are suitable for relocating to remote datacentres.
- Mitigation of the significant risk of service failure.
- Accurate assessment of the performance of key application transactions.
- Accurate network capacity requirements.
- Reliable method of modelling the effects of different network topologies on service resilience.
Maximise the commercial benefit from sharing application services with an accurate performance prediction.