Seven reasons why local governments need Azure Stack HCI

1 November 2022 Time to read: minutes

Local governments serve communities and citizens up and down the country, underpinning services we all rely upon. This vital work needs a solid and reliable framework in order to capitalise on cloud capabilities and manage digital transformation. Azure Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is designed to blend on-premises and cloud resources which will maximise storage, performance, scalability, and functionality, as a part of the built-in Azure hybrid capabilities.

What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)?

HCI converges compute, storage, and management resources to a single industry‐standard x86 server, forming a seamless, software‐ defined environment. HCI is simple to use and manage, does not require specialists, and is far more cost-effective and cost-predictable than many traditional solutions.

You can take advantage of cloud capabilities with its simplified access to cloud management and Azure services. Azure Stack HCI enables you to modernise your infrastructure and consolidate virtualised workloads, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. A modern on-premises hyper converged infrastructure can be as agile and cost-effective as the public cloud, especially when you project the costs over five years or beyond.

So what is holding local governments back from making the move to HCI?

Research has found that 80% of councils are still relying primarily on on-premise IT, despite an increase of cloud services used in local government. In the report Local Government Cloud Adoption 2021, published by Socitm and Eduserv, found that nearly 60% of councils are using cloud computing. Unfortunately, the rate of cloud adoption is hindered by legacy infrastructure, as Andy Powell, Chief Technology Officer at Eduserv, explains:

“Unfortunately, a legacy IT hangover caused by outstanding contractual obligations and the demands of maintaining or upgrading old systems so they remain fit for purpose, is slowing the rate at which councils can move forward.

“To better equip their organisations for a digital future it is clear that councils need to move quickly to formalise their approach to cloud IT, educate their organisations about the business outcomes that cloud can deliver and shift focus from maintaining IT to partnering the business through that change.”

There are many reasons why Trustmarque’s local government customers choose Azure Stack HCI, including:

What are the storage and datacentre benefits for local government with Azure Stack HCI?

Familiarity

It’s familiar for Hyper-V and server admins, allowing them to leverage existing virtualisation and storage.

Ease of upgrade

It works with existing datacentre processes and tools such as Microsoft System Centre, Active Directory, Group Policy, and PowerShell scripting.

Usable

It works with popular third-party backup, security, and monitoring tools, meaning less upheaval for your team.

Flexible

Offering flexible hardware choices allow you to choose the vendor with the best service and support.

Support

Joint support between Microsoft and the hardware vendor improves the customer experience

Seamless

Regular full-stack updates make it easy to stay current, effortlessly.

Tailored to your organisation

A flexible and broad ecosystem gives IT professionals the flexibility they need to build a solution that best meets their needs.

Why choose Trustmarque to support your datacentre project?

We are proud of our 30-year heritage of supporting organisations with their complex datacentre projects. We have worked with a vast network of technology partners to discover emerging and established technology and deliver solutions that make a real difference. Recently, we are hearing from customers that they often choose Azure Stack HCI in the following scenarios: