Independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm GlassHouse Technologies has developed a five-year storage strategy for Fife Council.

The Council realised that its system was time-consuming and difficult for staff to access and recover in the event of a disaster.

As the third-largest authority in Scotland, Fife Council delivers all local government services in the region managing a number of systems that control everything from payroll to the electoral role.

Paul Hammond, managing director of GlassHouse, said: “It was GlassHouse’s aim to establish a current and future structure for Fife Council. We gave advice on how to run, not to how to buy.

“In fact we encouraged them to buy less and add to their infrastructure instead.

“GlassHouse suggested how to improve its disaster recovery and how to upgrade its infrastructure, without over-buying. We were the gatekeepers instead of pushing certain vendors on the council.”

Fife council holds dispersed data in five centres, maintained under different policies and various levels of access.

As a result, GlassHouse advised the council to implement a tiered storage strategy split across two sites to compensate for outages in the event of a disaster.

Roddy Cameron, technical consultant at Fife Council, said: “GlassHouse was professional and did not push a vendor on to us. Instead it gave a clear strategy for a way forward.

“We have 500 servers and 150 applications. If there was a disaster, recovering all that data would be a nightmare.”