CUSTOMER STORY
Surrey & Sussex Police
How Surrey & Sussex Police’s digital transformation journey has created a new everyday for policing
Enabling the police to do their jobs more effectively needs not only the latest technology but the right infrastructure in place to support it.
In the case of Surrey & Sussex Police, the force’s legacy infrastructure simply couldn’t handle the amount of data and digital services that the organisation needed. The organisation knew improved connectivity would be the key enabler to the digital transformation of its blue light service.
The challenge
“It was a completely different mindset towards digital transformation than most people are used to. We wanted to empower our people with the ability to have the service they require to carry out their policing duties, as well as make it easy to support. Moving to the cloud has allowed us to do just that. Legacy network has had its day – now, cloud-based services are the way forward.”
Dr Steve Conn, Technical Project Manager, Surrey & Sussex Police
Surrey & Sussex Police recognised the potential of technology to support police officers in their everyday jobs. But its legacy infrastructure simply couldn’t handle the amount of data and additional digital services the organisation needed.
So the team decided to implement a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solution to:
- Improve network performance
- Boost security
- Reduce complexity
- Enable cloud-based services
- Reduce operating costs
This new technology would allow for quicker network connectivity, easier network management and greater flexibility to meet operational needs but most importantly the needs of its customers.
After multiple joint pre-sales workshops prior to tendering, Surrey & Sussex Police appointed us to deploy the underlying network infrastructure for its chosen SD-WAN solution.
Rapidly deploying intermediate internet solution
Surrey & Sussex Police had invested in body-worn video equipment before the SD-WAN project began, and needed to deploy this vital technology into the field as quickly as possible as an intermediate solution to the new WAN infrastructure.
Working closely with Surrey and Sussex Police, we initiated the rapid deployment of a high capacity internet solution to 30 priority sites within a few weeks of the order being placed, with the first site being successfully delivered just 10 days after hitting our delivery teams.
This enabled Surrey & Sussex Police to use the equipment while the core network and SD-WAN solution was being planned.
Connecting 106 sites under budget and ahead of schedule
We then provided the underlying SD-WAN infrastructure for Surrey & Sussex Police across 106 sites and 176 circuits, along with 10Gb connections between data centres.
This allowed the team to migrate many of their operational services to the cloud and intranet, while adding the ability to grow the network for additional services to be migrated in the future.
The Surrey & Sussex Police project team worked in partnership with a wide range of our stakeholders, creating a ‘one team’ environment to streamline processes consisting of over 60 personnel working in unison.
By working together in this way, we were able to complete the project in just 238 working days.
As Dr Steve Conn explained, “The project completed ahead of time and under budget allowing a successful migration of services, despite having to be delivered largely virtually due to the pandemic. It proved to us Virgin Media Business can deliver in difficult circumstances. It’s been an end-to-end collaborative effort and a very positive experience for our organisation.”
Cutting operational costs and increasing efficiencies through digital transformation
“We’re proud to be one of the first forces in the UK to adopt SD-WAN. Virgin Media Business has been very flexible, supportive of our goals and able to work with us at pace to put this solution in place. Not only is it helping to bring our policing up to date with modern technology, but it has also made it more efficient.”
Dr Steve Conn, Technical Project Manager, Surrey & Sussex Police
Surrey & Sussex Police is now enjoying the benefits of:
- Up to 10 times greater bandwidth on its network and faster speeds, helping create a better everyday experience for police officers and means they can spend more time focusing on face-to-face interaction
- Built-in network resilience for this critical blue light service
- Long-term capacity for future growth in data services and real-time processing
- Significant reduction in operational costs which in turn is a saving for the public purse
The project has delivered a network that’s scalable, flexible, manageable and fit for the force’s future growth, digital transformation and move to more cloud services.
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