Network Refresh Non Ministerial Department
Centiant has recently carried out a Network transformation service for two Non Ministerial Departments (Ofsted and Office of Rail and Road). Both departments were in similar situations in that they were moving services from a single IT provider and utilising smart sourcing to procure modular services from the market. This included the migration of services traditionally held on premise to cloud providers.
Like most central government departments OFSTED and ORR both have a central London office and regional offices across the country. Both departments, as a result of the smart sourcing exercise, were looking for a flexible supplier who could provide wire and wireless networking solutions across its estate. The existing estate were provided as a managed service by the existing provider and this network would be removed as part of the exit process. They needed to identify and contract a reliable and flexible supplier along with deliver the replacement service within a 6 month window.
The initial site (Lyneham) was contracted through a general further competition through a now obsolete framework. Following the success of Lyneham, a further three sites were awarded as direct award services through RM1045.
Solution and Outcome
Centiant is a vendor agnostic supplier and as such chose technology that was most appropriate for our customers’ needs.
We proposed solutions based on:
- Brocade LAN technology: – we selected Brocade as it share the same programming language as Cisco making transition quick and easy. It provides strong performance and a wide range switches in varying price and performance variants.
- Aerohive wireless technology: – We proposed the latest 802.11AC Wave 2 wireless access points based on the embedded controller technology from Aerohive. This wireless technology allows access points to be deployed without the need for a central controller. Additionally thanks to the hive technology users are able to move between sites seamlessly, automatically connecting to the network no matter what building they are based from.
- Sophos firewalls:- One of the non-Ministerial Departments required additional services in the form of firewall protection. We proposed the use of Sophos Unified threat management firewalls which in addition to firewall services also provides web content management and advanced intrusion protection.
The direct award process was rapid and allowed Centiant sufficient time working closely with the customer to deploy the network across multiple sites within the agreed timeline.
