Case Study: Our partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

  • Solution: Delivering IT consultancy to Central Government

  • Industry: Government

Our partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

The ICO was transforming the way they work as they moved from traditional on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. They needed to better understand the way their network had been configured and reimagine it to support their future needs. Neil Smithies, Head of Digital and IT Architecture, provides the quotes below.

The Challenge

“We understood the areas of our infrastructure that were providing a challenge for us, however we didn’t have the resources to provide the necessary expertise and dedicated focus to help us understand the infrastructure and strategize improvements”

The ICO traditionally used locally managed, VDI desktops, Cisco IP telephony and limited video streaming, had already moved to Office 365 and Skype for Business (hosted server), and were in the process of rolling out cloud managed & updated Windows 10 devices and hoping to increase their use of the cloud, including Azure Backup and consumption and streaming video for training content & staff briefings using Microsoft Stream / Teams.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) required support in understanding the legacy configuration of their network, to make recommendations on how to configure it to best suit their needs and then, look to deliver the configuration changes and transfer the operation and management of the network into their operational service teams.

The Solution

“The speed to deployment and the quality of the consultants. Our designated Consultants were Excellent - Matteo helped us understand and describe our requirements properly and then ensured that the delivery consultant matched our skill requirements and were able to hit the ground running and ask all the right questions.”

Our initial discussions surrounding the brief identified the need for a Network Architecture Consultant to be deployed to:

  • Carry out an Initial scoping workshop to clarify scope and provide details of infrastructure
  • Produce documentation of the ICO network estate
  • Provide best practice guidance for the removal of NAC Infrastructure, Qos settings for current and future state, network configuration, bandwidth and traffic management, and Network optimisation for MS Azure Backup, MS Skype for Business Server, MS Teams, MS Stream, Windows Update and MS Intune
  • Optional Delivery of NAC removal, Current state QOS settings, Improved Network Configuration, Bandwidth and Traffic Management, and Service transfer of configurations and processes into operational service.

The Results

“We would recommend the service provided by Consultancy+. The team been a pleasure to work with and have brought intelligence and enthusiasm to their work. They have made a great contribution to the organisation during their time here.”

Following acceptance of our proposal we proceeded to partner with ICO via Gcloud before introducing them to the YPO Framework as a faster route to market and supported them through this process enabling us to deploy our Consultant within a matter of days.

Our partnership with ICO has allowed them to address a critical project without delay and our flexible engagement models have ensured that ICO are able to utilise our Architecture as a Service (AaaS) offering when the need arises for as little or as long is required.

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