By **James Barrett**, Public Sector Sales Executive
By James Barrett, Public Sector Sales Executive
Across local government, cloud has become the preferred model for IT and communications. Research commissioned by 8x8 revealed at least 65% of UK local authorities now have a digital strategy in place and 82% of staff say new technology had a positive impact on their organisation.
However, the challenge for local authorities is to make sure that new technology, including cloud communications solutions, will improve citizen services and allow staff to work remotely.
The performance of a cloud communication service is dependent on the service level agreements (SLAs) and enabling technologies from the service provider. Equally, the existing network must be capable of supporting bandwidth-intensive applications, smart devices and real-time voice and video traffic. Network inefficiencies can cause the audio to “break-up,” and video to become “jittery” and unusable, so optimising performance to deliver a good user experience is critical.
Upgrading inefficient networks that deliver both continuous traffic optimisation and real‑time visibility while providing budgetary relief can really help. That’s where software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), comes in.
SD-WAN is a cloud-enabled networking infrastructure which uses any available connection to the internet by constructing a web of virtual private network (VPN) links. It makes the network more flexible and software-centric, delivering easy monitoring and management.
Local authorities can use additional connections to the internet, providing a much faster end-user experience for council staff working from remote locations. It also provides increased flexibility when connecting remote sites for shared IT support.
Cost-conscious local councils can benefit by shifting from expensive multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) services to SD-WAN solutions. While MPLS does a great job at managing a private network, when you move communications to the cloud, everything is routed through a single point of failure, causing bottlenecks and inefficiencies. SD-WAN solutions offer better traffic flow management.
SD-WAN abstracts away the hardware and puts all of its functionality into the software. It takes the intelligence of how a network is managed and decouples that intelligence from the network itself. Since its software-defined, it’s much easier to configure, deploy, scale and re-configure than hardware-based networking options.
In practice, it means that an IT manager can send an SD-WAN appliance to a remote council office. The discovery and identification processes are automatic, as is bringing the node appliance online, configuring it and applying governance policies. No further intervention from an IT manager is needed. A process that previously took days or even weeks, has now been reduced to a matter of seconds.
This increases the council’s control, peace of mind and savings while delivering crystal clear cloud communications services even to far-flung remote council offices with choppy internet.
As cloud delivery models become increasingly popular, cloud voice, video, even cloud contact centres can be hosted anywhere and everywhere, supporting mobility and reach. Councils can choose to not only optimise their cloud communications traffic but also cut expensive fixed lines, focusing instead on selecting the most effective broadband service: fibre, 4G, 5G or satellite and consolidating suppliers, allowing IT budgets to go further.
SD-WAN is much easier to monitor and manage since all the intelligence is abstracted away from the hardware and hosted at the customer premises or on the cloud. SD-WAN offers councils a centralised view of the whole network. It allows IT staff to make on-the-fly adjustments to enhance network performance and communications delivery to meet ever-changing needs.
Figuring out how to prevent network downtime is the one thing keeping IT admins up at night. How do you maintain business-critical communications if the network fails? SD-WAN improves network resilience by logically aggregating all those connectivity links, and can switch between links during an outage.
Not only does this provide continuous uptime, but because SD-WAN enables automated failovers, there no need for constant monitoring, analysis and reconfiguration during a failover. It ensures cloud communications and public services are available when council staff and citizens need them.
SD-WAN is an essential enabler for the next generation of IT and communications in local government.
We want to help you find new ways to achieve the positive impact citizens deserve.
Our dedicated public sector team can be contacted at uk-publicsector@8x8.com
For more information call 0333 043 8888 or visit 8x8.com/uk-public-sector
