Newcastle City Council upgrades to virtual SSL VPN for compliance and flexibility
(17/03/2010)

When Newcastle City Council was required to move its mail servers inside its own network as part of the Government Connect programme changes to its infrastructure were necessary. A virtual product (AEP Netilla VE) seemed to offer flexibility and resilience that a physical product was unable to deliver. In fact, it almost enables unlimited concurrent users.

Andrew Price, ICT Technical Consultant for Newcastle City Council, comments, “We were keen to meet the compliance requirements set down by the Government and to gain some additional benefits through the project. The SSL VPN that we had been using to date had done us proud and we had experienced no problems over the years that it was installed. However, with change comes the opportunity to review current systems and it was at this time that the virtual product (AEP Netilla VE) was highlighted to us. It seemed to offer us a degree of flexibility and resilience that a physical product was unable to deliver. In fact, we are now able to cater for almost unlimited numbers of users because the virtual environment has inherent flexibility.”

Although compliance was the main driver for the project, Newcastle CC has benefitted from several knock-on advantages. For example, with Netilla VE in place, the technology team is able to create test environments that are isolated from the live systems. This allows them to test scenarios before putting them into the live environment which is a distinct advantage when introducing new processes. Also, the virtual product delivers a much greater level of user flexibility and resilience than the physical set-up. In fact, it almost enables unlimited concurrent users.

As Price noted, “If there was an epidemic in the UK and our staff was not able to come into the office, we would not have been able to scale with the hardware solution. With our physical product we would only be able to allow up to 750 concurrent users which would be an issue in this scenario as we have as many as 7,500 users in the organisation. However, in the virtual world we would be able to easily manipulate the system to enable all staff to work effectively from home and still maintain access to the files that they need to do their jobs.”

Now that the project has been implemented to the requirements specified, Newcastle CC can look to its future planning. The intention is to take the Council’s Outlook Web Access users and have them connect to the council’s services through virtual SSL VPN. This will make OWA more secure and dramatically extend the current system implementation.

Price concludes, “The projects carried out to date have been relatively painless and cost effective. We have been able to rely on the systems once implemented and have pretty much left them untouched.”

AEP Networks Ltd is exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2010, on 27th – 29th April in its new venue Earl’s Court, London, www.infosec.co.uk.

Opinion piece submitted by John Bailey, Marketing Director, AEP Networks