Government reaps the benefits of virtualised hosting

A growing number of organisations are joining our Government Ready Platform to benefit from the added value it provides. It is a shared virtualised hosting environment that has been built specifically for government organisations.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) have already signed up to the Government Ready Platform.

The shared platform provides organisations with benefits such as replicas of the live site available for development and testing, hot standby remote-site disaster recovery, and low-cost virtual licences for software and operating systems.

As well as providing organisations greater value for money and reducing their carbon emissions, the VM based platform also benefits from being more resilient than a physical hosting service, and is designed for zero planned down time. It is also highly scalable with the option to significantly increase capacity at anytime.

When the government departments BERR and DIUS merged to form BIS they needed a hosting solution that could be flexible to accommodate both organisations’ data as well as ensure minimum downtime. The Government Ready Platform provided them with a solution that both organisations could trust and were happy with. The flexibility of the platform meant their website was designed, developed and live within two days.

Will Callaghan, Corporate Web Manager for BIS, added: “We chose to host the BIS site with Eduserv because they already hosted the former DIUS corporate website and are consistently first rate. Since launch, the hosting for the new BIS site has been the most reliable we have used with the greatest resilience and uptime.”