Salford City Council has taken a transformational step on its digital journey by adopting public cloud services with cloud and managed services provider ANS Group.

The project has seen ANS implement a flexible and scalable public cloud solution, which will provide the council with faster and more effective p/enterprise-cloud/cloud/erformance of its customer-facing digital systems, as well as increased security and disaster recovery capabilities.

The new infrastructure also provides the council with in-depth business intelligence capabilities, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics. One example of this is that the council and its customers can now predict future demand for services such as how many school places are needed in specific regions.

Salford City Council also offers managed services to a range of third-party organisations including The Landing at MediaCityUK, a leading Northern tech hub. The additional capabilities provided by public cloud will enable the council to offer state-of-the-art, digital services to its ever-growing customer base.

Jon Burt, corporate infrastructure architect at Salford City Council said: “We aim to be forward-thinking when it comes to our technology choices and vision, and we look for partners to match. We’ve worked with ANS for over five years and the team has a complete understanding of both our broad commercial objectives and the intricacies of our IT infrastructure.

“They are the cloud experts and have been with us every step of the way on our cloud journey.”

This partnership follows the news that ANS has been awarded the Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency Certification, which demonstrates ANS Group’s ‘best-in-class’ ability and commitment to helping customers migrate and advance their digital business applications in Microsoft Azure.

Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS Group, said: “Salford City Council is a leader in its sector and remains ahead of the curve when it comes to providing digital services. The capabilities provided by public cloud are crucial for any organisation looking to achieve more in today’s world, and in this instance the Microsoft Cloud was the right decision for the council – it’s future-proofed a number of important elements while delivering an improved user experience.”