Tourism Ireland moves to a BT hosted Cloud platform to cut costs and gain efficiencies

Tourism Ireland has moved the majority of its IT operations to a private cloud based solution in BT’s Dublin data centre in a five-year deal worth €850,000. By consolidating internal and customer- facing services, the agency will reduce its data centre footprint by nearly half, thus cutting power and hosting costs while gaining new operational efficiencies from the hosted infrastructure.

Conor Marshall, Head of ICT and Product Strategy, Tourism Ireland, said, “We have worked with BT for many years so it was the natural next step to leverage its proven expertise in hosting, networks, security, virtualisation and consolidation as well as the underpinning hardware infrastructure that will radically simplify all our IT and deliver it back to the business as a managed service.”

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.”

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 web sites, including discoverireland.com, and has a presence in over 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. 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.

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.

A new generation of network technology was also an enabler, according to Niall 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.