Content

Procurement of professional services days for
Guildford's current MFD (printing/scanning equipment) support
partner to migrate a print/scan server to Guildford's Microsoft
cloud tenancy.

Reasons for the decision

Guildford is currently implementing a new ICT
network following the announcement that its current network will be
shutdown on 30th August 2024 as part of the termination of a shared
service that Surrey County Council own. To improve the resilience
of ICT services, the Council intends to reduce its technical
dependencies on Millmead House. Centrally managed multi-functional
devices (combined printer/scanners) are currently dependant on a
Millmead House based server. This manages authentication, queues
and device monitoring/reporting.

To prevent remote site multi-functional devices from failing in the
event of a Millmead House technical incident, Guildford intends to
move the printer management software from this Millmead server into
a cloud environment.

As Guildford is currently in a managed service contract for these
devices, and is charged based on usage, the printer management
software licensing is owned by the managed service provider (Vision
Office Technical Services Ltd).

Alternative options considered

As the printer management software licensing
is owned by the Council's current managed service provider (Vision
Office Technical Services Ltd), the software needs to be migrated
by Vision as the licence holder.

Options to move to the software vendor's cloud service (a SaaS
offering) as well as the option to replace the software with
Microsoft 365 print management capability were considered but the
cost of these options were forecast to be greater than migrating
the software to a cloud provisioned server (IaaS).