As Head of IT and Digitalization in Herlev Kommune, Kim Ladegaard moved all on-premises servers to the cloud. To assure a smooth start they used Kostner who specializes in cloud cost management.
With his IT and Digitalization team he worked out a solution to present to the management to move all on-premises servers to the cloud. “It didn’t make sense to me to first upgrade our on-premises servers and then later have them moved to a new address. The municipality had plans to relocate the city hall’s physical address. It would be too complicated and very expensive. Based on this, the management decided to move all servers to the cloud” says Kim Laadegard.
The need for flexibility
In the fourth quarter of 2021, all servers were in the cloud – except for one system. The key for the IT department is “flexibility” where data and systems are moved from physical servers in the basement to the virtual servers in the cloud on the Microsoft Azure platform. Moreover, throughout the last three months, more than 2.000 new entities – laptops and smartphones – have been set in use and give all employees access to exactly the systems they need.
“We’ve created a digital ecosystem, to eliminate the number of errors in the future. Hence, it is important both hardware and software are integrated. On top of the cloud transition, the employees need access to the Microsoft 365 platform and all existing computers and tablets need to be changed to Microsoft Surfaces… Our whole set-up is built on an ecosystem with Microsoft hardware and software. This means that all employees use the same Microsoft devices and have access to software and applications from Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365” says Kim Ladegaard.
Pilot attempts before going full cloud
The municipality completed three pilot attempts before moving all servers to the cloud.
The first pilot attempt was the “Jobcenter”, with their systems being moved to the cloud.
After that, to test the devices with the new setup, the digitalization department completed a wide pilot in the organization with 45 employees from different departments – administrative personnel, sosu-assistants, physiotherapists, project leaders and nursing staff. As a management tool Herlev Municipality uses e.g. Microsoft’s Intune, which gives the option to customize the applications that the employees need.
Herlev Municipality has made an internal subscription scheme, where the departments pay for the equipment that their employees use.
“It becomes very clear for the different departments, what they get and what they pay for. There is complete transparency on the matter. On top of that we get all our devices registered and have better control over them in the future” says Kim Ladegaard.
Cloud Cost Management
In the municipality’s journey towards the cloud, Kim Ladegaard has used Kostner. He decided to bring Kostner along for the journey right from the beginning to use their FinOps service. Kostner analyze the economy in the municipality’s cloud journey and give recommendations based on this on how to keep costs down.
“As Head of IT, you risk losing the economic overview, when you give out more than 2.000 new devices to employees, who have customized access to Microsoft’s many different products, and at the same time move servers to Azure. It’s easy enough to create new servers, licenses, and services, but if you don’t manage it tightly, you risk that the economy runs wild. We have made a deal with Kostner to analyze the economy of our cloud environment once a quarter. Here they give recommendations on how we can keep our costs down.”
Already at the first analysis, Kostner saved Herlev Municipality 140.000 kr. – and that was only based on the small part which they ran in the cloud at the time. “That saving came before we started using Microsoft 365 for several thousand employees” Kim Ladegaard adds.
Kostner has collected a lot of data on license agreements and costs for services in an algorithm and then crosses and compares these with the municipality’s actual usage. That way, the algorithm can find changes that can affect the costs for the municipality.
Big potential
There is a big potential in taking advantage of the options in the cloud, as it gives the option for working in new ways.
“Some ask me if it isn’t more expensive to have all servers in the cloud instead of on-premises. But I think you need to consider the whole setup and solution. Not only focus on the price of the servers. You must look at all costs and what the organization gets out of using the whole palette. In the new set-up, we are removing ourselves from the idea that one’s work must be physically tied to one place. Instead, we will look at it as an activity that can be done from anywhere. In this regard, flexibility is one of the keywords in our digital transformation” says Kim Ladegaard.
This article was first published in KITA in Danish and has been translated to English by Kostner.
