When IT technicians at Horsham District Council wanted to upgrade the Wi-Fi to maintain PSN compliance and the provision of VoIP telephony services they opted for external expertise to deliver tangible benefits.

Horsham District Council employs almost a 1,000 people at several sites throughout West Sussex and provides a broad scope of public services to more than 130,000 local residents.

In 2014, technicians recognised the need to address some fundamental issues concerning the provision of IT services, notably the reconfiguration of the existing Cisco-based wireless network to ensure fast, reliable and secure access to council services.

Core network services also required reconfiguration to provide a resilient and scalable service as well as a guaranteed quality of service for traffic prioritisation across the network.

This had to be supported by on-going maintenance and technical advice, so the council turned to public sector technology specialists Calibre Secured Network Solutions, who completed a review of the whole IT system and examined existing base-line configurations and logs.

This identified among other issues that the core network architecture was restrictive and misconfigured, preventing a consistent level of service quality across the network.

The reconfiguration of the network and the standardisation of quality service levels network-wide was completed by the Newcastle-based firm, whose services enable local government organisations to maximise their return on investment through the deployment of technology to meet their business challenges.

The work to improve the network architecture involved logical and physical changes while two high performance Cisco switches were deployed to increase performance for some key servers and services within the contact centre area of the business.

Benefits

Following the work, network performance levels have significantly improved, leading to the provision of a high quality and far more reliable service for people who access the council’s services on remote PCs and smart devices.

Problems with VoIP telephony have also been resolved, creating an all-round better performing system that’s used by external and internal customers: for instance, calls are no longer lost, or cut-off and overall call quality has improved dramatically.

Calibre has also resolved Wi-Fi security protocol problems which in turn has not only increased system capacity, but also enabled staff personal mobile devices to be used via a council BYOD policy to automatically and securely connect to online and email services.

John Mangan, the council’s IT technician said: “We have benefitted from Calibre’s excellent service. They’re extremely professional and know what they are doing.

“They also take the time to explain what they’re planning and ensure that we understand the implications before proceeding. Their solutions are sensible, practical and always good value for money, delivering clear benefits for us.”

Calibre provides IT solutions, working across the UK and Europe with clients building long-term strategic relationships to deliver added value solutions, which provide lasting user benefits.

Call 0845 5576355, email info@calibre-secured.net or visit www.calibre-secured.net/