Warwickshire County Council saves over £260,000 with Google Workspace

When faced with a £2 million budget reduction, Warwickshire County Council’s IT team needed to take drastic action to ensure they could still serve their residents effectively. And since partnering with Google, the Council is now well on the way to realising those much-needed savings.

An internal review highlights immediate savings

Following news of the budget cuts, Tomino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets, reviewed all of their IT operations to identify areas for significant savings.

The corporate email system was a prime candidate for attention. Over 20 years old, the platform was costly to maintain and support, consuming valuable cash that could be better spent elsewhere.

The Power of the Cloud

On-site email was hugely costly due to hardware maintenance, software licensing, and the network team's time managing the system. Having heard that Cloud systems provided all the same functionality and power, Ciuffini began talking to providers who could assist with hosted email. 

It quickly became apparent that Google Workspace was the perfect solution. Not only could the solution offer enterprise-grade email for the entire Council, but it also offered many other valuable tools and time savings.

It took just eight weeks to move 3000 council workers’ accounts to the Google Workspace ecosystem and bring the whole workforce up to speed with the new tools. The Council has since grown to 5500 team member accounts.

Not just about money

Ciuffini clearly states that his review was not simply about identifying immediate cost savings. “We wanted to share our facilities more effectively, improve the flexibility of our IT for staff, and make it easier to work with external partners,” he said in a recent interview.

Warwickshire County Council needed to streamline its services by using Google Workspace's cloud-based nature, coupled with the platform's natural flexibility.

The collaborative features of Google Drive were an instant improvement, allowing staff to work together on the same document in real-time. The quality and accuracy of their work increased immediately as team members no longer had to chase down the most current version of a particular file because it was now readily available in Drive.

Access to data and productivity tools was equally valuable at any time, any place, and any device. Council employees can now work in the office, at home, or on the road—anywhere their local service users need them. With the addition of Google Chat to their productivity toolkit, they can communicate in real-time with the rest of their team, helping to eliminate unnecessary face-to-face meetings and the time wasted travelling to each event.

How much has Warwickshire saved?

According to Ciuffini’s calculations, IT savings have been made across the board. But replacing the in-house email server with Gmail has significantly reduced license costs for a start – to the tune of £100,000. And retiring the old email server infrastructure has saved another £100,000, followed by a further £60,000 through reduced on-site support costs.

Impressively, just using Gmail helped Warwickshire County Council claw back an eighth of the needed budget reduction. But this is just the headline savings. These savings will be ongoing – all future app upgrades are included in the subscription fee, helping keep capital costs low.

New, more efficient working processes will help to reduce operating costs across the Council as a whole. The flexibility to continually develop new ways of working will assist the organisation in quickly adjusting to the changing needs of its service users.