Slough Borough Council has outsourced its datacentre for a monthly cost of£30,000.
The council co-located its datacentre to hosting company Savvis following the decision to sell the previous site as part of its cost-cutting agenda.
Simon Pallett,Slough Borough Council's IT head,said moving to other council-owned premises was not an option as the land might be at risk of further sell-offs,and buying a new site outright was prohibitively expensive,with costs estimated at around£1m.
The council spent£110,000 on the move.The datacentre runs 179 of its applications on the council's own servers as it wanted to retain control of its systems.
Some 27 council IT staff remote link into the servers.All the major hardware maintenance is also carried out by the council's own IT team.
Pallett said moving a datacentre was not something it had ever done before,so it was"scary"unplugging 200 servers,putting them in a lorry and hoping the services would run once they were reconnected in the Savvis datacentre.
"We did the move over the weekend,and on Monday everything was fine,"he said."Later down the track we hope to operate infrastructure-as-a-service and testing systems in the datacentre."
