Issue - meetings

Presentation by the Executive Director of Corporate Resources and Customer Services  

The Committee received a presentation from Helen Spreadbury, Senior Manager ICT & Digital that provided a security update on the Cloud Migration.

Ms. Spreadbury highlighted:

•       That a Cloud First Strategy was required because Sefton’s ICT Infrastructure was aging and required significant investment to ensure it could scale up to meet increasing demands for ICT resource and capacity

·       One of the objectives of the Strategy set out in 2016 was to provide an Integrated Cloud Service

·       The Cloud Migration Position Statement

·       The forecast end position

·       The next steps once migration was completed  would include decommissioning and right sizing of the data centre at St Peters House; the removal of legacy applications no longer in use; planning the decommissioning of legacy applications in line with the implementation and deployment of new solutions such as telephony; the rationalisation of the remaining applications onto a smaller server footprint; that it would be necessary to align the forward plan for procurement to those applications that could not currently be moved to Cloud; and that the above work would inform the final sizing of the new Data Centre at Bootle Town Hall

Members of the Committee asked questions/commented on the following issues:

·       Activities by other local authorities.

·       GPs and other primary care providers should be considering Cloud Migration.

·       Assurances that servers were not provided by hostile nations.

·       Up-to-date licenses and systems.

·       Assurances against anti-hacking, website issues and outages.

·       Security aspects of Microsoft Azure.

·       Use of pen-drives by the Council.

·       The carbon footprint produced by the central servers.

·       The reduction of 4 servers to 2 servers.

·       Multi-factor authentication, including fingerprints.

·       Device security.

·       Use of laptops by Council users outside the UK.

·       Generators within the Council.

·       Power surges and alarms.

RESOLVED:

That Helen Spreadbury be thanked for her informative presentation.