Theme 4 - Digital Foundation
We will create an environment where our services are always reliable by maintaining a highly available, efficient, integrated and secure infrastructure.
The outcome aims of this workstream are that:
- at least 50% of our people can carry on working in the event of a disaster to allow services to continue
- the information we hold about people is secure
- our network is available 99.9% of the time
- more staff say our IT platform meets their needs
To do this we will:
- continue to expand on our M365 platform to enable smarter working, application rationalisation and greater collaboration within the council and our partners
- deliver a consistent, fit for purpose IT experience for all our staff by upgrading our LAN and WAN offerings, deliver an improved Wi-Fi experience from all our settings
- provide the latest digital solutions in line with business requirements to ensure we deliver a consistent approach
- develop a fit for purpose IT service model that meets the requirements of our workforce
- develop our use of automation technologies to drive efficiencies in our processes
- improve our resilience by removing the remaining single points of failure from within our technology infrastructure
- Ensure an annual review of our IT Infrastructure Backup and Security Resilience Risk Assessment is completed, with reasonably practicable mitigation actions executed as identified.
Digital Foundation – progress so far
So far:
- we have designed and built a new state of the art Data Centre, which has removed a significant risk for the council and enhanced our disaster recovery capability whilst also reducing our carbon footprint
- we have identified and removed single points of failure within our infrastructure to make it highly available
- we have responded to the change in working practices by investing in laptops for our staff and the introduction of 'Always On' VPN technology
- we have invested in our virtual desktop by building our 'Connected Workspace' platform capable of providing staff a high-quality computing experience 24 hours a day
- we have started our migration to Microsoft 365 by delivering a new online email service and implementing MS Teams across the organisation
- to provide a better online computing experience for all our staff and visitors we have built a new high quality Wi-Fi service – this is being rolled out to key council sites and over the lifetime of this strategy all council sites will be provisioned with this service