UK Public Sector Organisations Trim Security Costs Through Technology Consolidation

In times of austerity it is the public sector that feels the impact of initial expectations to save money and become more efficient. Private sector organisations need to be driven by necessity before they act and pursue efficiencies, whereas the decision is made for the public sector at a governmental level and usually at an early stage. As such, public sector organisations like councils often find themselves thrust into the role of pathfinders in order to make efficiencies and cost savings.

IT is an area where many efficiencies and cost savings have been made. It is often the case that council networks have been built over a long period of time in a piecemeal fashion, and consequently, there is huge scope to not only make them more costeffective, but indeed more efficient and with greater flexibility and performance.

Increasingly, councils are acting as IT shared service providers for education, healthcare, and other bodies within their boundaries and are sharing resources as a means to make broader efficiencies between these organisations. However, the sharing of IT resources brings with it a raft of complexities and challenges, not least of which is the challenge of delivering a robust and secure service that is flexible enough to cope and which, ideally, simplifies the IT infrastructure and its management instead of further complicating it. Faced with this challenge, an increasing number of council IT departments are reevaluating their network infrastructure and making a decision to consolidate their solutions, or even start again from scratch. The Public Services Network (PSN) has been a catalyst for transformation and change.