Overview
Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) has outsourced large elements of its ICT support for the past thirty years. However, in 2022, GCC embarked on a journey with the ultimate goal of regaining control of the customer experience. As part of this strategy, GCC wanted to insource its technology and ICT support to in-house resources. They partnered with Cantium Business Solutions (Cantium) to support them on this journey.
Cantium worked alongside GCC, assisting with the design, target operational models, insourcing and implementation of learnings from historical challenges, as well as developing an understanding of the Council’s plans for the future. Due to the legacy technical debt found during the audit, Cantium also provided a managed service contract to GCC for the Infrastructure elements, to allow GCC time to prepare before moving this element of their support in-house too. Alongside this, GCC asked Cantium to support them in implementing several ICT projects to enable Digital Transformation.
Background
Cantium Business Solutions
As a Local authority-owned trading organisation (LATCo), Cantium has over 40 years of experience supplying IT services to the Public Sector. As such, we have developed a comprehensive managed service portfolio, built alongside a strong partner network, to support and complement the services we deliver in-house.
Our highly experienced and dedicated teams, consisting of over 300 ICT specialists, provide advice, guidance and support to over 33,000 users. With a customer base of over 700 organisations across the Public, Private and Education sectors, Cantium offers a range of ICT services tailored to our customers’ individual needs.
Gloucestershire County Council
GCC is based in the City of Gloucester in the South West of England. The geography of Gloucestershire includes part of the Cotswolds, the entire Forest of Dean and the Severn Valley, an area of over 1,000 square miles. GCC has approximately 4,000 staff, delivering Social Care, Education, Infrastructure and Transport, Highways, and Healthcare services to approximately 1 million Gloucestershire citizens.
GCC is working to deliver digital transformation to transform and improve the delivery of IT and digital services for council staff, partners, customers, and citizens alike.
A Partnership Approach
As an organisation responsible for public services within its region, the customer recognised the need to work with Cantium on supporting its legacy infrastructure while completing and establishing new projects and programmes of work to upgrade and transform its physical and virtual equipment and processes.
Adopting a proactive approach, Cantium focuses on continuous improvement for our customers, regularly seeking opportunities to deliver cost savings and increase service quality. During this consultative process with the customer, we identified areas where we could aid GCC, focusing on server, data centre, network, database, and security administration and improvement. This would be through both managed service business as usual (BAU) workloads and project management. Cantium also provided insights to GCC on ITIL best practices for areas such as change management and incident and problem management.
Objectives
Cantium collaborated with the customer to achieve the following objectives:
- Support day-to-day BAU activities related to ICT Infrastructure and work on continual service improvement to lower high and critical priority tickets.
- Improve GCC’s security posture, focusing on the ability to report and resolve threats and vulnerabilities via routine patching and identification and remediation of security misconfigurations.
- Provide out-of-hours support for critical applications that impact social care delivery or access to GCC applications and infrastructure.
- Improve network stability through the delivery of key transformation projects, including the Remedial Transformation Project for the Network Upgrade designed to migrate the existing legacy network to a new BT-delivered network provision.
- Work with GCC to develop their technical roadmap.
- Identify areas of technical debt and assist in the transformation of legacy infrastructure.
- Support the improvement of Project and Programme Governance and reporting to provide GCC with greater visibility of project progress.
- Collaborative development of GCC’s ICT Roadmap, aligning business objectives and Digital ICT strategy.
- Enable GCC to take the ICT Infrastructure support in-house.
The transition of bringing outsourced ICT Support Services back in-house after 30 years of outsourcing has been much easier with the support provided by Cantium.- Sherrill Holder, Assistant Director of Digital and ICT, Gloucestershire County Council
The Solution
Cantium proposed a managed service contract with additional project and architecture services to work alongside GCC in partnership to help achieve their roadmap goals.
This partnership between both companies resulted in:
A Managed Service Contract
Cantium conducted a thorough assessment of the customer’s infrastructure, processes, and strategy, and was able to tailor a contract that met GCC’s requirements. This included Cantium deploying staff to work within GCC for the period of the transition, who assisted in the service design and employment of key staff figures for their in-house ICT department.
Transformation Projects
Cantium created proposals for several large-scale transformation projects, including:
- an Azure B2B programme,
- moving their LiquidLogic solution from on-premises to a SaaS solution,
- supporting various aspects of GCC’s ICT One Programme,
- GCC Exchange Online Migration,
- and upgrading their SAN environment to eliminate single points of failure and enhance storage reliability.
Cantium also took on support for several in-flight projects left uncompleted by GCC’s incumbent supplier including:
- Remedial Transformation Project for the Network Upgrade
- The Remediation for Windows 10 (Features and Windows 7 Libraries)
Improved Security Posture
Cantium has recommended and implemented several security recommendations for GCC. Included in these recommendations are:
The deployment of Microsoft Defender to GCC’s end user Devices, which allowed for greater control over malware scanning and reporting on patching cadence for Microsoft operating system and application deployments.
The deployment of Tenable and Tenable AD to the GCC estate allowing in depth reviews of vulnerabilities across the entire GCC estate.
More recently, Cantium has supported the implementation of a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tool, working with a 3rd party to do so. This provides GCC with additional data to detect, analyse and respond to security threats before they harm the business operations.
Roadmap and Strategy
Cantium provided a clear strategic roadmap to GCC for their WSDP, covering both short- and long-term solutions and strategies. This included mapping out new SAN and compute technology, Azure tenant remediation, migrations to the cloud, and removal of legacy physical hardware and virtual servers.
The Benefits
Throughout the course of the Cantium and GCC partnership, GCC has realised numerous benefits, improvements and cost savings:
Improved Stability and Performance
- Cantium successfully migrated GCC’s on-premises Citrix environment which resolved an ongoing Citrix user session disconnect problem – an issue that had impacted their customers and users for several years. This project was taken over by Cantium in the transition of the contract and was a side-by-side migration of the Citrix On-Premises environment from Citrix XenApp 7.6, which reached end of life to CVAD (Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops) 1912 LTSR (Long Term Service Release). Furthermore, the migration stabilised the Citrix host performance, seeing a massive reduction in hosts crashing to what is now, a very rare occurrence.
- Cantium completed a project to move the council from tape backups to a cloud solution, reducing the need for on-site visits and tape storage. This has improved restore times for items such as Microsoft Office 365 mailbox restores, which have reduced from hours to minutes for completion.
- Cantium implemented monitoring for all servers via Datto tooling, with integration into the ServiceNow ITSM (IT Service Management) tool for automated ticket logging and integration into Microsoft Teams for SMS alerts to a dedicated out-of-hours number. These improved response times to outages enabled Cantium to proactively resolve or begin to resolve issues before GCC and their customers experienced outages or issues.
Collaboration
- Cantium visited GCC’s Service Desk for two days to provide onsite training on first contact fixes and sat with the team as they took calls to guide them through questions to ask that would streamline ticket resolution and improve overall customer satisfaction.
- Cantium introduced monthly meetings between Cantium Enterprise Systems Administrators and the GCC End User Device (EUD) build team to collaborate on the EUD build image, ensuring that the latest drivers and updates were applied, and removed any applications no longer in use to reduce build time.
- Cantium provided cover for the GCC Service Desk for a day, allowing all ICT staff the opportunity to attend a business wide event. During this day Cantium resolved 34 out of 36 tickets at first point of contact.
- Cantium took on support of GCC’s ServiceNow and provided BAU management as well as continual service improvements for their instance, including improvements to their Change Control module and reporting.
- During Cantium’s contract with GCC, we have seen a steady evolution of the customers ICT strategy. Cantium has played a large part in this due to;
- Building out GCC’s strategic roadmap, based on the customer objectives.
- In-depth analysis of the legacy estate, including identification of risks and technical debt.
- Assessing the most cost-effective options for remediation of technical debt.
- Developing a proposed remediation plan/programme aligning with GCC’s strategy.
Security and Vulnerability Improvements
- Cantium undertook a review of GCC’s Active Directory and put in place Role Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring that staff had both domain and administrative accounts rather than a single privileged account. Cantium also implemented Privileged Identity Management (PIM) and Privileged Admin Workstations (PAW), which enables Cantium and GCC to review in greater detail what Azure and M365 access is needed and approved across the estate. It works on a least privilege needed model, allowing the council to perform administrative tasks in a secure way.
- As part of the Tenable and Tenable AD implementation, Cantium developed and implemented a seamless integration between the Tenable platform and the Cantium ServiceNow ITSM system. This allows vulnerability data to flow automatically between the two systems, enabling Cantium infrastructure staff to respond swiftly to newly discovered vulnerabilities.
- As part of Cantium’s mission to continually improve services for our customers and clients, we also reviewed and improved GCC’s patching processes. At the start of the contract, server patching took over three weeks to complete, but with both technical and procedural changes, Cantium was able to reduce this to five days, ensuring patching on servers is 100% completed the week after patch Tuesday, utilising Datto and Tenable reporting for compliance.
- Cantium also reduced the end user device patching effort from seven days down to one, which has helped drastically with GCC’s renewal of their Public Services Network (PSN) accreditation, something that the council had not been able to achieve in the year prior to our partnership.
- Cantium’s assistance with GCC’s PSN accreditation has meant that the council achieved this for two years running and has provided GCC with insight into the best approach to their accreditation going forward.
Cost Saving
- Throughout the multiple migration project pieces and through BAU monitoring, Cantium has reduced the number of servers on the estate, including both physical hosts and blades. This has also resulted in the possibility of reducing rack space within GCC’s data centres providing cost savings on rack rental and electricity consumption.
- Following UKCloud’s liquidation in 2022, Cantium responded quickly, decommissioning a UKCloud-based domain controller and saving GCC over £40k in licencing and service costs.
Customer Testimonial
The transition of bringing outsourced ICT Support Services back in-house after 30 years of outsourcing has been much easier with the support provided by Cantium. Their partnership approach was key to the success of the project, and their seamless collaboration with our in-house teams has seen very positive feedback.
Regaining control of more ICT support services has helped to improve customer service. By working collaboratively together to share knowledge, upskill internal teams, stabilise the infrastructure whilst making improvements, GCC, with three years of support from Cantium are now able to bring the remaining services back in house as planned.
– Sherrill Holder, Assistant Director of Digital and ICT, Gloucestershire County Council
Conclusion
In our time working with GCC, we have supported them in achieving their overarching goal of regaining control of their customer experience and developing their ICT Infrastructure support in-house. Along with several other improvement projects, the cost savings of the work we have completed are yet to be fully realised. However, the non-financial benefits are clear, as seen in the benefits above.
As GCC come towards the completion of the WSDP, they are bringing their ICT Infrastructure management in-house with their other ICT support services. Cantium is pleased to have helped them achieve this a year ahead of schedule, and we look forward to remaining a working partner to support them with any future projects or support requirements to ensure a smooth transition for Council staff, customers, and strategic partners.
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