City Council appoints local firm for data centre services

21 January 2016

Aberdeen City Council has awarded local firm brightsolid a three-year contract to manage its data services.

The agreement will see brightsolid provide Aberdeen City Council with a managed data centre service, through a private cloud with the Council's production and disaster recovery housed within brightsolid's facilities.

The contract is for £1million per annum through to May 2017.

brightsolid was selected as it provides flexible data centre services at a competitive price, as well as its position as the only Scotland-based company that could deliver the services required by the City Council.

Aberdeen City Council required a flexible IT partner which could ensure any citizen, no matter how remotely located, has fast access to its services at all times.

In addition, brightsolid has migrated the City Council's entire IT estate to its private cloud in six weeks, with an added disaster recovery plan.

Aberdeen City Council Finance, Policy and Resources convenor Councillor Willie Young said: "Aberdeen City Council has been impressed with the quality, flexibility and personalisation of service during transition to the new arrangements in extremely tight timescales, with minimum interruption to normal service.In brightsolid, we have found a partner with whom we can innovatively work as we digitally transform our council services while also reducing our operational costs."

brightsolidis a private cloud provider which owns and operates world class data centres in the north-east of Scotland connected by a high-speed network. The first Scottish partner on the Microsoft Cloud OS Network, brightsolid provides industry-leading IT solutions to oil and gas, public sector and enterprise organisations.

Richard Higgs, CEO of brightsolid, said: "Aberdeen City Council has a very exciting vision that includes working collaboratively with other local councils, truly engaging with the community and providing high quality provision of connectivity for everyone.

"We're delighted to provide the technology and personal service that will help the Aberdeen City Council team to meet these critical objectives.

"When we made the decision to open a facility in Aberdeen our intention was to help the city become a centre of technological excellence and winning this business shows it's truly something we can do."