Details relating to the use of cloud services by the SIA
Published 30 May 2023
© Crown copyright 2023
This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: psi@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.
This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/details-relating-to-the-use-of-cloud-services-by-the-sia/details-relating-to-the-use-of-cloud-services-by-the-sia
1. Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following information:
- The duration of time utilising cloud infrastructure
- The criteria used to choose a cloud provider
- The percentage of infrastructures employing cloud services
- The supplier of cloud infrastructures used (AWS/Oracle/Azure etc.)
- Case studies highlighting the successful implementation of the ‘Cloud-first’ strategy
- The uptime of the cloud infrastructure
- The annual budget over the last 5 years for IT-managed services
- The percentage spent on cloud-managed services
2. Response
I can confirm that the SIA does hold this information. A response to each point is provided below.
For the purposes of answering this FOI request, we have interpreted the request into the following definitions:
- Cloud infrastructure: IaaS and PaaS services used to provide compute and networking services.
- Cloud provider: any service provider who provides any service that can be described as IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.
- Cloud-managed services: cloud services that are under the management of a service provider (not the software/hardware vendor). This scenario typically applies to IaaS and PaaS but in some instances some SaaS may also be incorporated into the platform that is being managed.
2.1 Duration of time utilising cloud infrastructure
The SIA started using a community cloud platform (UKCloud IaaS) in the second half of 2017 to host internal facing systems and moved to a public cloud (Azure IaaS) platform in late 2019 to host public facing services as part of a managed service provision. As of August 2021, all SIA infrastructure (internal and public facing) is based in Azure.
2.2 Criteria used to choose a cloud provider
The criteria will vary according to the type of service being procured and the requirements/priorities of the business. As a public body we are required to pay particular attention to value for money.
2.3 Percentage of infrastructures employing cloud services
100%
2.4 Supplier of cloud infrastructures used
Azure
2.5 Case studies
The SIA does not hold this information.
2.6 Uptime of the cloud infrastructure
Azure uptime is calculated by Microsoft, monthly per service for the purposes of determining service credits. Microsoft do not commit to an uptime figure however have SLA agreements in place for each service which can be found here.
However, over the last 12 months, overall availability of the Azure platform has exceeded 99.9%.
2.7 Annual budget over the last 5 years for IT-managed services
Please note these figures are for IT services as a whole. We do not have a specific annual budget for IT-managed services.
| Financial year | Budget |
|---|---|
| 2018 to 2019 | £2m |
| 2019 to 2020 | £2.5m |
| 2020 to 2021 | £2.9m |
| 2021 to 2022 | £3.1m |
| 2022 to 2023 | £3.6m |
2.8 Please provide the percentage spent on cloud-managed services
For the last 5 financial years the average percentage spent on cloud-managed services was 65%.
[Reference: FOI 0412]