The IT Needs of the Public Sector
[Notes: Journalists are invited to quote and use information from the backgrounder below, but please ensure all comment is attributed to Darren Metherell, Enterprise Sales Manager, Claranet Ltd.]
The government’s vital role in the lives of the nation must be supported by secure, efficient and always-available IT infrastructure. At the same time, because it is funded from the pockets of the public, it has a duty to spend taxpayer’s money wisely. The public sector spends £14 billion a year on IT, the highest figure in Europe and double the sum spent in 1999. The public sector accounts for 55 percent of the whole UK market for IT.
The challenges facing the public sector are to provide the vital services we all need, ensuring the security of the huge amount of sensitive data it holds, and providing value for money; all while building this infrastructure with the capability to adapt to changing demands.
Private organisations have discovered that providing these services in-house and employing and training the required staff is very costly in terms of time and money. This is as true of government as it is of big businesses. In 2004 a National Audit Office report into government IT procurement concluded: “The history of failure of major IT-enabled projects has been characterised by overspends, delays, poor performance and abandonment of projects at major cost.”
Yet quality of service and value-for-money need not be mutually exclusive. The answer is for public sector authorities to outsource their IT infrastructures to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). By outsourcing the management of their network and moving their infrastructure to externally hosted environments, government departments are freed to concentrate on serving the public.
This allows the public sector to provide a more adaptable and robust service at greatly reduced costs. A Managed Service Provider with experience of working with government, like Claranet, recognise the importance of offering tailored levels of service that fit the varying size and scope of different departments’ IT requirements.
Some authorities requiring low-maintenance and simple platforms need to outsource the management of their day-to-day network operations completely; others will wish to keep control of much of their infrastructure while outsourcing the provision and management of areas they cannot cover in-house.
Only a Managed Service Provider with an intimate knowledge of the public sector’s wide and varied needs can supply the IT infrastructure that enables a government to serve the public efficiently, securely and economically.
Security
Public sector organisations of all sizes need to be able to supply fast and
reliable access to their systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But the sheer size of government IT services means that providing and maintaining this technology is a constant problem.
The first of the public sector’s key IT needs is network availability. Network uptime is even more crucial for the public sector than for private companies. Not only do government agencies depend on website payment systems to generate revenue – a case when network downtime proves financially and politically costly – it is absolutely imperative that they can assure 100% availability of potentially life-saving services, such as NHS Direct or the emergency services.
The second main IT need for the public sector is security. The public sector holds ever-increasing amounts of some of society’s most sensitive and confidential information and is under massive pressure to ensure that the information is held securely.
A Managed Service Provider like Claranet provides best-of-breed security software and hardware to protect data and essential services. These include firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, DDoS mitigation and managed anti-virus and anti-spam protection. All security solutions are tailored to the exact needs of each organisation, either as hosted services or as standalone services. All networks are supplied with varying levels of redundancy, eliminating a single point of failure within the network.
Storage
The amount of data held by organisations, both public and private, is constantly increasing. As the amount of data held rises, so the cost of managing that data rises too. Simply purchasing more storage media might seem to be the solution but this merely increases the storage costs in the future.
A Managed Service Provider like Claranet, with multiple world-class datacentres, can provide storage space sufficient even for the largest organisation, while keeping the data backed-up and secure from unsolicited intrusion.
Disaster recovery
With the increasing threat from natural disasters and terrorist attacks, the importance of disaster recovery has never been greater. Recent disasters, both natural and man-made, have highlighted the need for organisations to function with the loss of their main building. But it’s not just catastrophic events that need to be planned for – anything that keeps workers away from their desk can have disastrous consequences for critical public services.
Continuity is the vital factor in planning for disaster. To ensure this, redundancy must be built into the public sector’s main networks, so that when one part of the system fails, the redundant system kicks in immediately, providing a near seamless and almost unnoticed handover. For additional insurance, servers and applications can be mirrored and hosted at an alternative site to switch to if the main servers fail.
Remote Access
Remote access is another key element to disaster recovery. Public sector organisations need to supply their employees with remote access so that they can work as productively from home as in the office.
Home working has important benefits outside disaster recovery, though. The drive for flexible working is being headed by the public sector. The needs of working parents with young children and the cost of accommodating employees in an office environment are two of many issues that have led to central and local government bodies implementing home working initiatives.
A Managed Services Provider such as Claranet can provide leading technical solutions for remote access using SSL VPNs: virtual private networks utilising secure sockets layer (SSL) security protocols. SSL VPNs allow workers and partners to connect safely through the Internet to shared network resources.
Connectivity
The public sector strives towards the ideal of ‘joined-up government’ where all the different elements of government – from policy-making to service provision – are linked, ensuring strategic co-ordination between different parts of the public sector.
The diverse geographical locations of authorities’ remote sites means robust and efficient networks are essential to achieve this goal. Government workers, wherever they are situated, must be able to access their organisation’s internal system.
A Managed Service Provider like Claranet can provide several means of connecting remote sites, such as Wide Area Networks and Virtual Private Networks. They also supply different methods of connectivity – DSL, leased lines or Ethernet for example – all of which can be terminated on fully managed routers.
The Challenge
There are several important IT challenges facing the public sector. Costs must be cut, while continuing to provide the public with the very highest levels of efficiency, security and network availability.
By outsourcing to a Managed Service Provider like Claranet, government at local and national level can ensure that they are not only provided with the most secure, reliable networks; they can also have the reassurance of a team of experts dedicated to maintaining those networks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Claranet provides low-maintenance, simple-to-use platforms while managing the minutiae of day-to-day operations. This reduces the time and money that government devotes to IT, leaving it free to concentrate on providing the services that the nation needs.
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Notes to editors:
Journalists are invited to quote and use information from the backgrounder below but please ensure all comment is attributed to Marino Zini, Head of Managed Services, Claranet Limited.
For further editorial information or to arrange an interview please email the Claranet press office or telephone 020 7609 1900.
About Claranet:
Claranet was established in 1996 as a dial-up Internet access provider in the UK. The company's sustained profitability has resulted in continuous reinvestment, transforming Claranet into a multi-national managed service provider.
Today Claranet provides flexible and tailored network infrastructure that performs to the requirements of its 300,000 customers across six European countries and the US.
Claranet customers have confidence in their connectivity. Customers are served by experienced, innovative and dependable technicians.
Claranet commits to the highest standard of service level agreement.
URL: www.uk.clara.net