Worthing Borough Council is strengthening business continuity and security related to online public services as part of an overhaul of its connectivity and firewall infrastructure.

The council has brought in CI-Net, in a three year contract to cover installation and ongoing management including dual, load-balanced clustered internet connections which automatically failover in the event of disaster, and a centralised jointly managed firewall with round-the-clock intrusion monitoring. A new Virtual Private Network (VPN) is supporting secure remote working for an increasing number of employees.

“In the last few years we’ve seen a sharp rise in the number of council services delivered via the web – from council tax and housing benefit to a variety of leisure offerings. And many of our staff are heavily reliant on Internet and email. So it’s essential to have a resilient and secure environment to keep public services online and employees productive. Because we’re handling people’s personal and financial information, security is paramount,” said Mark Gawley, ICT services manager.

The CI-Net service is built around a StoneGate firewall which is being configured to load balance and failover between a primary 10 MB/s Ethernet line that is already live and a secondary 2 MB/sec connection being implemented in the next few months.

“Two separate connections from different service providers means public services and staff productivity won’t be affected if one of them is hit by a problem. And the firewall lets us control Quality of Service for specific traffic types, so we could decide to give a bigger priority to email or web traffic for example,” explained Gawley.

CI-Net will provide regular reports on traffic crossing the network border and 24 hour monitoring to identify any unusual activity trying to infiltrate the network through web servers, web services or by breaking firewall rules.

“A jointly managed service with experts tracking our borders 24-7 is vital. We know we can pick up the phone to a CI-Net specialist if we need someone to change firewall rules or the VPN’s remote access policies at short notice. This might be because it’s outside normal hours in an emergency or simply because we don’t have the manpower or specialist expertise to do something,” explained Gawley.

Previously Worthing’s connectivity infrastructure had grown organically over a period of years into a complex environment. “We had around ten separate internet links and a variety of firewalls and web servers relating to different council business units,” said Gawley.

“We needed to simplify and centralise things in order to manage security more effectively and benefit from economies of scale. We saw a number of suppliers but CI-Net came up with the most straightforward cost effective solution, which is flexible enough to expand as our needs change."

During implementation, CI-Net kept the older connections and firewalls running in parallel while various council services and systems were transferred to the new infrastructure. The aim was to avoid disruption during the transition.