Tourism Ireland has moved the majority of its IT operations to a private cloud based in BT’s Dublin data centre. The five-year deal worth €850,000 will reduce the tourism agency’s data centre footprint by nearly half, reducing energy and hosting costs.
Working closely with Tourism Ireland, BT designed, implemented and will support a private cloud solution to deliver all the technical and operational requirements as a single managed service contract.
Responsible for marketing the island overseas as a holiday destination, the cross-border agency has utilised the latest technology since it was formed in 1998 under the framework of the Good Friday agreement.
Employing 150 people, it runs more than a dozen websites, including discoverireland.com, and has a presence in more than 20 countries. It was looking to consolidate its operations while retaining the demarcation between internal and external activities.
The BT private infrastructure service achieves this with network, servers and a storage system set up to facilitate internal IT, as well as customer-facing services as a common resource pool.
Cloud achieves economies of scale
The best of both worlds, it gives Tourism Ireland the advantages of centralised infrastructure and economies of scale without impacting on the two distinct sides of its business.
Niall Powderly, head of IT Infrastructure, BT Ireland, said: “For enterprise organisations like Tourism Ireland, the infrastructure in BT’s Citywest facility offers levels of efficiency and opportunities to innovate that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.”
A new generation of network technology was also an enabler, according to Powderly.
“Organisations that were reluctant to move IT off-premise are now looking at it because BT networks are faster and more affordable. You can now move infrastructure to a data centre at a very reasonable price and have no performance impact,” he said.
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