Scottish Prison Service moves records to VPN

The Scottish Prison Service plans to halve the voice and data running costs by installing a virtual private network.

The high-speed network has been installed at the Service's 15 prisons and young offenders' institutes, its Edinburgh headquarters, training college and store facilities.

It expects to double bandwidth and dramatically improve running speeds of centrally hosted applications.

Staff accessing financial software, email and human resources applications using the multi-protocol label switching network from Scottish telecoms provider Thus, will benefit from connections capable of transferring data at two Mb/s.

The prison service decided to upgrade its network following the introduction of a web-based prison records system last year, which was requiring increasingly more bandwidth.

'We have tended to double our bandwidth every year,' said the Prison Service's information support systems technical manager, Gavin Syme. 'Last year we had a major re-write of our prison records system and that also needed more bandwidth.'

The network will also reduce the time it takes to access bandwidth intensive applications from minutes to less than thirty seconds, says Syme.

'We also expect to save 50 per cent on running costs,' he says.

The Scottish Prison Service selected Thus to implement the network, while hardware provider Omnetica has been working with both companies to provide equipment at each location.

'We needed a secure system to ensure system availability,' he said. 'It is important to us that our communications are available as we are very reliant on information systems.'

The prison service says it is also considering running its telecommunications services over the data network in the future to further reduce IT operating costs.

'We want to make the network voice over IP ready for the future,' said Syme. 'We are now looking at the costing to see if it is of any benefit to use in the future.'