THE CHALLENGE
Many of Gwynedd Council’s staff attend meetings that are based at different sites belonging to other authorities. This posed a problem as staff were unable to secure connection to their home network without accessing a remotely hosted desktop. This in itself restricted usage of some functions, and could also be unintuitive to users accessing the systems. Health and social workers working within each other’s locations would have difficulty connecting to their own networks, and would have to travel to their own building’s network to update records if network access was unavailable locally.
The solution
PSBA implemented its simple and cost-effective wireless roaming service, which allows staff to connect to the organisation’s network when they are on the move. PSBA’s Multiple Occupancy Site Service (MOSS) was also introduced, allowing all council locations to share connection.
This has helped Gwynedd Council to manage authentication proxy and has allowed employees, including staff at GwE, to instantly access the resources they need from PSBA Roaming enabled sites while outside of their own network, connecting to the home network seamlessly. PSBA Roaming also allows the local health authority staff to securely connect to their own network when they are visiting schools or other enabled council offices.
This has helped workers who are permanently situated at sites owned by Gwynedd Council to share the organisation’s service and connect via a single Wide Area Network (WAN) connection. Gwynedd is able to securely segregate each organisational network, rather than manage multiple WAN managed services, which was the norm before implementing MOSS.
PSBA’s services have allowed our staff to work collaboratively. External authority staff can now access their network from our sites and complete tasks there and then, rather than returning to their own base. Gwynedd staff are also able to connect securely in the same manner from other authority sites where MOSS has been enabled. Staff benefit from being able to be co-located, while helping to reduce our costs. Our network team is also more productive as we spend less time managing multiple network services and requests from different organisations across the county.
Ian Roberts, Technical Lead for the council’s network
