Edinburgh-based recruitment consultancy Head Resourcing is aiming to reduce costs by 20% and its carbon footprint by 80% by moving its IT infrastructure to a private cloud.

Managing director Gordon Adam told Recruiter that the company will move its back-up and disaster recovery, email exchange and recruitment database to the cloud in that order. “In a month’s time the aim is that we will have no servers on site,” he said, explaining that this is where the carbon and cost savings will come from, alongside support and maintenance, which in future will all be included in its monthly fee to cloud provider Lumison.

Head Resourcing supplies both contract and permanent IT and business change talent to financial services and corporate clients, and also has a large international medical division, Head Medical, which supplies doctors from Europe to Australia and New Zealand. It also recently opened a second office in Leeds.

One of the main drivers for the move was the need to increase the resilience of its IT set-up, having grown from 31 staff in 2008 with a turnover of £10.2m to 50 employees in 2011 and an estimated turnover of £50m. At the end of last year, Adam said a hard drive failed and it highlighted the firm’s IT vulnerabilities.

A consultant recommended the private cloud approach, which appealed to Adam who had had concerns about cloud computing in the past. “Our database and data are our Crown Jewels and I didn’t like the idea of putting them somewhere in the world in the big cloud,” he said. “This offers a kind of halfway house. The data is still down the road in the UK but we no longer have to worry about servers and the costs. Lumison has been our internet service provider for 10 years, so we know and trust them.”

While the main driver has been resilience, Adam said the cloud will also provide faster and more straightforward access for his consultants who work at home and from the Leeds office. “We’ve also talked about an international office and this would make that a doddle from an IT perspective,” he said.

Dr Aydin Kurt-Elli, chief operating officer at Lumison, said it expects to attract more recruiters to the private cloud who have “high-service and uptime” needs and who also want scalable platforms to support their growth.

“Public cloud services that are generally available remain problematic for mid-sized and growing organisations, particularly those with security and compliance requirements that require due diligence and transparent operating practices,” he said, adding: “At the application layer, private cloud service can cost 20-30% more than public cloud services. However, you are getting integrated services across virtual local area networks (VLANS), with traceability, diligence and full 24/7 UK-based technical support.”

With debate about the pros and cons of public and private clouds in the IT world, recruiters need to thoroughly research both options if they are looking at the cloud and make sure they understand the costs. “Remember that on the public cloud, you only pay for the computer resources you actually use, whereas with private cloud you’re paying to reserve capacity for maximum loads, even when it’s not in use,” said Phil Wainewright, president of EuroCloud UK, the industry body for software-as-as-service and cloud vendors. “It’s a false comparison if you calculate the public cloud cost of keeping the same load running for the whole month because you would never do this in practice.”

He admitted that if you want integrated VLANs, onshore support staff, telephone helpdesk and other enterprise-grade services, it will cost more than the “bargain-basement” commodity public cloud services but it is worth shopping around. “Those options do exist and you can get them along with the scalability, flexibility, continuous improvement and pay-as-you-go economy of public cloud,” he said.

www.headresourcing.com
www.lumison.net
www.eurocloud.org.uk