Brighton & Hove City Council strengthens resilience in the cloud

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NEC Revenues & Benefits is now running in our fully-managed cloud. As a result, Brighton & Hove City Council is confident that its Revenues and Benefits system will stay online in a crisis.

BUILDING ON A TRUSTED PARTNERSHIP

Brighton & Hove City Council has used NEC Revenues & Benefits since 1999. For the last 15 years, we’ve also managed their remote database administration and more recently took over their UNIX support.

Although we already managed their system, the set-up of their data centre no longer met their needs. They were finding it harder to allocate resources to manage it, for example to perform recovery tests or arrange access for maintenance. David Pannell is Systems Programme Manager within the council’s Revenues & Benefits Department.

“We shared a data centre with a neighbouring council. It was secure but there was work to provide the level of resilience we needed: the back-up tapes had to be taken off-premise every night.”

David Pannell, Systems Programme Manager

Therefore in April 2021, Brighton & Hove moved to the secure UK data centres of the NEC cloud service.

“By using NEC’s cloud service we’re far more confident about disaster recovery. It’s about the Head of Service being able to sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that if the worst should happen, the system can be brought back quickly, with minimal loss of service”

David Pannell, Systems Programme Manager

MAKING A SMOOTH MOVE TO THE NEC CLOUD SERVICE

With contracts only signed in November 2020, we faced a challenging timetable. Weekly calls with the infrastructure and software teams kept things on track, and the council went live seamlessly in April 2021.

David’s team can now:

Call on a dedicated client services manager for help and advice.
Deliver a smooth system for users, as we maintain all interfaces with the Department for Work & Pensions
Bring systems back faster in the event of any problems as it’s constantly ‘mirrored’
Improve the processes around upgrades, as we deliver work quarterly

Looking ahead, the council will also be rolling out our Citizen Access self-service solutions. We’ll be keeping those systems safe in the cloud too.

“Joining the cloud was about de-risking our systems. Having a dedicated client services manager makes it a gold-standard service too.”

David Pannell, Systems Programme Manager