What does central IT really cost? An attempt to find out!

1. What does central IT really cost?An attempt to find out! Heidi Fraser-Krauss Head of IT Services University of York

2. About the University of York • 15,000 FTE – has doubled in size over last 7 years • Russell group member since 2012 • Turnover of around £270 million • Very flat structure, 29 budget holding departments • Central IT part of the Information Directorate • Budget £5 million • £3m on staff £1m capital £1m recurrent

3. Why? • To understand where money is spent. • To be able to compare our costs with those of other providers- cloud….. • To be able to price services that we offer to others. • Curiosity! • To have evidence to argue for more resource. • To understand central vs. local provision costs.

4. Its worth noting….. Our methodology evolved, we had to start somewhere

5. How- understanding services? • Started with getting an understanding of our systems and services • DNS • Finance system • Active Directory • Storage • Listed physical and virtual servers and attributed each server to a service There were lots of gaps!

6. How- Costs? 3. Got a handle on license and maintenance costs • Hardware maintenance • O/S licenses • Enterprise system licenses 4. Added up hardware capital costs 5. Worked out a cost for a virtual machine • Physical infrastructure • VM license

7. How- Costs? 7. Worked out a cost per Gb of storage • Differentiated tiers 8. Attributed these costs across the different services • Group heads allocated staff-time to the previously identified services 10. We attributed staff costs to services • Difficult to do as no time sheets • Accounted for time spent supporting non-central systems

8. Work in progress….. • Software license costs • To date a broad brush for major systems • Attribution of data centre costs • Capital • Running costs • More accurate attribution of power and cooling • Can do it per server • More sophisticated use of TraC costs • Add in depreciation of capital costs • Cover whole University

9. Keeping up to date • Attribute purchase orders to service • Once model in place and costs known shouldn’t be difficult to keep things up to date

10. Lessons learned • Need a firm grasp of services at a detailed level • Takes time • Things get missed out • Staff cost allocation without time sheets is a best guess, and difficult to do. • We used an iterative approach for obtaining costs • This annoyed people • It could have been done in one iteration

11. Lessons learned contd. • This is not just an accountancy task, it needs a lot of technical knowledge to understand how services fit together. • What is useful knowledge for IT is not necessarily useful for Finance and vice-versa • The network is a very large part of your costs

12. Challenges • How to allocate network costs or other costs that are truly infrastructural? • How do you cost the network for student record system?

13. Some figures….. • Storage tiers /Gb/year • £2.33 NetApp • £0.31 Sunfire X45100 • Wireless/year £338,000 • PURE/year £41,000 • Identity management/year £79,000 • SITS/year £163, 000 • Agresso/year £95, 100 • VLE/year £155,000k

14. Thanks to…. Stefan Wielgosz Data Centre Manager Sarah Hall IT Accountant