East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service
Discover how we helped East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service enhance and improve existing their SSRI process with transformative applications.
ESSEX COUNTY FIRE & RESCUE | Emergency Services | 1,250 employees
The CLIENT
As one of the largest fire and rescue services in the UK, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service provide prevention, protection and response services from fifty fire stations across Essex. The service covers an area of 1,4000 square miles and helps protect the county’s 1.8 million population. With Essex being a county of contrasts, the force responds to a variety of needs from their residents.
The Challenge
In line with the UK Government’s cloud-first agenda, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service were keen to migrate as much of its server and application infrastructure to Microsoft Azure with the aim of reducing costs and simplifying disaster recovery processes.
To ensure they were getting the most from migrating to the cloud, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service engaged early with Risual, a Node4 Company, for a vision and scoping engagement. This engagement focused on the full end-user computing transformation to help them understand the benefits of Azure, as well as moving key productivity workloads to Office 365.
After completing their vision for longer-term aims, the service knew that the agility they were looking to achieve relied on a reliable data centre environment (using the best of Microsoft Cloud) that integrated with on-premises capabilities where appropriate. However, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service were looking to undertake a cloud application analysis to help them fully understand how their move to Azure would help bring the agility and cost savings they required.
“There are many well documented benefits of moving to the cloud, and we were keen to make the most of those as an organisation. We knew Azure was going to help us free up space, save us costs and was in line with our overall strategy as an organisation”
The Solution
The cloud application analysis is a short engagement where a Business Analyst from Node4 is tasked with uncovering all applications used by Essex County Fire and Rescue service, as well as identifying where they’re hosted and providing recommendations on migrating them to the cloud.
“The first thing we realised upon agreeing the engagement was that we didn’t have a definitive list of all our applications, we had departmental silos where departments were using applications without IT knowing exactly who was paying for or supporting it.”
Dennis Leeks, ICT Programme Manager at Essex County Fire and Rescue Service
To collate the required information, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service ran projects to establish secure communication links as well as setting up a virtual datacentre in Azure that was ready to migrate applications and services onto. risual ensured that these workstreams ran efficiently as well as managing project interdependencies.
After collating the relevant information, a migration roadmap was created to highlight the steps towards cloud migration as well as ensuring alignment to their business goals.
The ResultS
The cloud application analysis allowed Essex County Fire and Rescue Service to build the foundations towards cloud migration. They now have a definitive application catalogue as well as Digital Application Passports to allow further analysis and a clear view of their application estate.
A Power BI dashboard was provided to allow the service to interrogate the data in their application catalogue, providing recommendations and guiding decisions on which applications to migrate and when, as well as a clear cost of providing application services.
Essex County Fire and Rescue Service have also been able to consolidate their SQL database servers – this provides an opportunity to reduce licensing costs as only one SQL database is required to run multiple applications. Using PAAS (platform as a service) further reduces the total cost of ownership of test and development environments. Essex County Fire and Rescue Service can now be more efficient when using their test and development environments, as they’re able to build a more secure and well-run environment that runs when needed.
“Migrating to the cloud will provide consolidation of the SQL database servers – we have around 30 database servers which we can rationalise and allow one SQL database server for multiple applications, which allows us to reduce licensing costs and increase efficiency”
Dennis Leeks, ICT Programme Manager, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service
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