Case Study: Ashford Borough Council achieves virtualized voice, major cost & energy savings and improved resilience with Mitel

Council faces pressure when demands for services are up but budgets are down

Ashford Borough Council, which serves more than 112,000 residents across Kent and delivers over 500 services, faced rising service demands alongside shrinking budgets and a small three-person IT team. The council needed greater reliability, lower costs and simpler management of an aging infrastructure that relied on 60 physical servers and was costly and time-consuming to maintain.

By virtualizing its data center and voice systems—running Mitel MiVoice Business and Contact Center solutions on VMware vSphere—Ashford reduced its server estate from 60 to three, cut power costs by 40–45% (projecting up to 60%), and lowered CapEx and OpEx. The move improved service availability, simplified management, enabled rapid disaster recovery (from days to about 20 minutes), and freed IT staff to focus on innovation, making Ashford the first UK council to virtualize voice at this scale.

Ashford Borough Council

Rob Neil

Head of ICT and Customer Services