City Turns to Collaboration Solutions to Support Mobility

As we quickly approach Telework Week 2013 in March, I’ve been hearing a lot of discussion around the benefits of telework and the level of growth we have seen over the last few years in the demand for mobility.

Mobility is sometimes easier said than done, though, especially when you are a city government looking at bandwidth increases and potential infrastructure upgrades all while providing employees with a seamless virtual experience and avoiding any downtime in the process. This is exactly what the City of Jacksonville, NC did, and they are setting an example for other cities in similar situations.

The City of Jacksonville home to more than 70,000 residents and currently has more than  500 end users in its operations center that is supported by the city’s Information Technology Services (ITS) department. As the employees became more dependent on the ITS department, the department decided it needed to refresh its current infrastructure.

In addition to an upgrade, the city planned to open a second operations center to continue to provide support for public service locations such as City Hall and the police department. The ITS department needed to open the new center without resulting in downtime or ineffective communications between the two centers.

Because of the long standing relationship the city had with Cisco and the comprehensiveness of Cisco solutions, Jacksonville chose to deploy Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) to deliver next-generation virtual workspaces to its operations centers and offer greater server scalability and uncompromised performance. VXI and UCS have allowed users and IT to have more mobility, flexibility and choice, helping decrease management costs and improve productivity. Cisco has allowed the seven-member IT team to more quickly address IT issues while helping ensure consistency among the virtual workspaces.

Cisco VXI also allows Jacksonville to support the increase in mobile workers as well as devices. With VXI, employees are able to access work materials and city resources from anywhere, anytime, and also use their mobile devices without compromising security.

Unless you work for the City of Jacksonvile, how are you or your employer providing mobile access to resources?