Salford City Council offers cloud service to local businesses

Salford City Council will offer a private cloud service to local businesses through a partnership with ANS Group.

The community cloud project is built on a multi-tenanted cloud platform installed and supported by ANS Group in partnership with Salford City Council's in-house IT team.

John Mullen, assistant mayor for IT at Salford City Council, said: "We want Salford to be a connected city with a good technological infrastructure. By making cloud services available to local businesses we are improving what the city is able to offer, while also generating much needed income for the council at a time of extreme budget cuts."

Jon Burt, corporate infrastructure architect at Salford City Council, said ANS Group had enabled it to resell the cloud-based platform it built for the council.

Over the last four years, Salford City Council has replaced aging infrastructure with a private cloud. It is now offering this infrastructure as a shared service.

Salford's cloud infrastructure is based on ANS Group’s Flexpod architecture which comprises Cisco UCS blade servers, NetApp storage, VMware virtualisation and Cisco Nexus switches.

Graham Catlin, founder of Bowerbank Consulting, said: "There is a real role for local authorities to support start-up businesses. Catlin was previously involved in building a datacentre facility for Cheshire Council, which was developed not only to support the council's IT but also to provide hosted services for other councils.

"The work being done at Media City in Salford means there is an opportunity to attract new talent, in a similar way to how the M4 corridor has been very successful."

ANS Group is also developing an £8m datacentre facility in Manchester as part of the city council’s strategy to attract media and new technology businesses. 

Paul Sweeney, managing director of ANS Group, said: “Manchester is turning an old Sharp Electronics 200ft² warehouse into a digital city. 

"We are taking two spaces to build a datacentre with a 1,600 rack facility for Manchester council."

Sunderland City Council has also offered its datacentre facilities to local businesses.