Helping the NHS and local government improve the resilience and affordability of their digital services

The UK’s plans for digital government often stall the moment they meet reality: a typical server room. In many departments, the beating heart of every online transaction is still a single room with flimsy doors, scarce cooling and little security. Almost all (97%) public sector on-premises computing continues in such inefficient and unreliable facilities. The UK public sector has consistently underinvested in its own IT infrastructure, and we are now seeing the consequences as digital plans are put on hold in another round of belt-tightening.

Yet, modernising does not require a blank cheque. By relocating equipment from these legacy rooms into purpose-built, shared data centres, organisations can cut costs, boost resilience and shrink their carbon footprint. Crown Hosting, the single supplier of GCA RM6262, has supported this kind of transition in practice, helping departments consolidate ageing estates without requiring a major capital investment.

It makes little sense to persist with small, costly and outdated server rooms when far more cost-effective, resilient, environmentally sustainable and secure alternatives are available.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s (DSIT) State of Digital Government Review 2025, surveying 120 public organisations, has outlined the drag-effect on digitisation created by continued use of outdated infrastructure.

As the report highlights, the UK was a leader in digital government with the NHS App, GOV.UK One Login and Universal Credit to its name. Now, however, “the digital foundations are creaking and services have not kept pace with other countries or the private sector.”

The report says 47% of central government and 45% of NHS services lack a “digital pathway” which means citizens use the phone or paper correspondence too often. Services are not joined up and are held back by legacy assets and systems. Most public sector organisations lack comprehensive registers or quantification of the legacy risk they carry.

The DSIT report revealed that a quarter of public sector organisations suffered critical outages in 2024, 123 in NHS England alone. Despite the government’s Cloud First policy, only 53% of central government organisations have more than 60% of their estate in the cloud. Local authorities and the NHS are less advanced. The vast majority (95%) of NHS Cambridge’s estate is on-premises, for example.

If organisations stick with the current outdated on-premises estate, they are failing to make best use of public money. DSIT found cooling costs, for instance, can be three times the cost of power because of outdated facilities and buildings. There are significant gaps in cyber resilience and many smaller public sector organisations have no back-up. Underinvestment in technology increases long-term costs and total costs of ownership, the report indicates, with maintenance of legacy systems three or four times the cost of modern alternatives.

Unfortunately, experience demonstrates that change only occurs after adverse events like disruptions and outages, or a lack of power to support upgrades or greater use of AI. When organisations double their power requirement for IT in a small server room, it also doubles their cooling requirement, which becomes unsustainable.

This has resulted in some public sector organisations rethinking their infrastructure entirely. Case studies from Crown Hosting show that relocating a 20kW server room can reduce electricity usage by as much as 75%, depending on the estate. In Crown Hosting environments, the cost of cooling is a fraction of what is needed in old server rooms: 15p for every pound of IT spend, compared to £3 in a server room. While not every modern facility delivers the same level of efficiency, the broader benefits generally include renewable power, high-voltage grid connections, and emergency backup systems to maintain operations during grid disruptions.

Pay-as-you-use contracts remove the long commitments that often scare buyers away, while the security gap is dramatic. Instead of overheated rooms propped open with a chair, teams gain access to sites with round-the-clock staff and layered physical protections, all designed to keep services running.

Budgets may be tight, yet the demand for fast, reliable digital public services is only growing. Moving infrastructure to the right environment delivers better value for every pound and frees teams to focus on the software and data that citizens rely on.