The effect of Covid-19 on digital transformation at Trafford Council

In an emergency, is it better to stick with what you know or take a risk?

Many organisations have seen their transformation plans upended by Covid-19 - but others stepped up to the challenge and have accelerated their designs, driven by the necessity of having a modern IT estate to remain operational in the pandemic.

Trafford Council is the local authority of the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford in Greater Manchester. One of ten metropolitan district councils in Greater Manchester, it provides the majority of local government services in Trafford.

Then…

Like many organisations around the world, Trafford Council was looking to transform its IT infrastructure before Covid-19, launching a programme to make it easier for customers to access its services. By re-engineering and automating workflows, and streamlining customer interactions through self-service, the IT team knew that digital transformation would change the way the Council worked and the services it offered.

A key element of the preparatory work was to understand how the Council's employees were accessing applications, when they were accessing those applications and critically, where they were accessing them from - in the office, on the move, or at home.

In parallel, the IT team were almost ready to press the green light on a Windows 10 rollout; for most staff that meant a laptop upgrade and the option to work remotely more often, and for longer periods of time.

And then the pandemic happened.

Due to Covid-19, with all of the remote working demand it entailed, the priorities for Trafford Council's IT teams changed in an instant.

Jon Thomson, Head of IT Operations at the Council, explained, "IT is a key enabler for all of our services, but for some services it's absolutely critical. Our number one priority was to keep our core critical services up and running, regardless of where the team was based. We had to mobilise those members of the team - and fast."

Bringing in the cavalry

Prior to the pandemic, a small number of Trafford Council's team required remote access to the IT infrastructure via Pulse Secure's Remote Access VPN. Peak usage was fairly low - on average around two hundred people per day.

With nearly all of its employees now working remotely, Trafford Council needed a solution that provided access to around ten times as many users as its existing technology licence would allow.

In the months leading up to the initial lockdown, the IT team had worked with a team from Trafford Council partner BlueFort Security to assess a range of potential alternative connectivity options - but all that fell by the wayside on March 23rd.

Thomson said, "When in a code-red situation, you need a proven piece of technology that's scalable and resilient. We had confidence and faith in the BlueFort team and the Pulse Secure platform. Neither had let us down thus far, so we decided to stick with what we knew: a technology that is robust, scalable, and simply did its job."

The first thing the BlueFort team did was to establish a Pulse Secure ICE (In Case of Emergency) licence for Trafford Council, while they set up more permanent licences for the team to use. This emergency licence enabled Trafford to instantly address the dramatic peak in demand for remote access by supporting additional users on physical and virtual appliances.

With the lion's share of the work taking place over what the team described as ‘a very long weekend,' within 10 days Trafford Council was able to scale up to provide reliable, resilient access for 2,100 employees, with an average daily usage of 1,500 users.

…And now

Throughout April, Thomson and his team worked to deploy laptops to staff within the council's critical service areas. As a result, many of their users were fully set up to use the Pulse Secure VPN technology.

One of the important benefits to Trafford Council was the VPN's ease-of-use: for example, many security checks occur automatically, without the user being aware. Given that the Council's staff have varying degrees of IT literacy, Thomson was keen to continue with a platform that employees were comfortable and confident using.

With the UK facing regional lockdowns at very short notice, Trafford Council is confident that all their users will now be able to work securely and efficiently wherever they are.

Thomson concluded, "Considering the unprecedented demand that BlueFort Security and Pulse Secure were processing for literally hundreds of users, we experienced minimal disruption. We were well supported by both teams and the result was that none of our critical services suffered, and all our users were able to work remotely very quickly."