Isle of Man moves public services to hybrid cloud

Peter Clarke, chief innovation officer at the Isle of Man Government, said: "Our analysis indicated that VPLEX would reduce operating costs by 15%. We wrote our business plan around this. It was a compelling argument."

EMC's system includes Fully Automated Storage Tiering innovation, which automatically analyses system usage patterns to help improve operational efficiency and enables users faster access to applications by moving in-demand applications and data automatically to flash drives, at that time back onto disk arrays as demand falls.

The Isle of Man's private cloud research adds to public cloud services it already uses. For instance, all of the local government's emails are received clean because a cloud service provider, who Clarke did not want to name, takes out all the spam previously it is delivered to inboxes. Around 90% of incoming email is spam, he said, which equates to millions of emails.

This year, it completed the desktop virtualisation, with all desktops running on Microsoft Windows 7 and applications delivered through Microsoft's virtual platform App-V. It has 5,000 desktops, and around 2,000 personal devices, and applications can be delivered to all of these on any platform.

Next year, the government plans to virtualise the network, which is a single, homogenous network from Cisco that has departments segregated by security.