Outsourcing IT at Whakatane District Council
Server consolidation, network security and customised reporting all require highly-skilled specialists. And when you add everyday IT operations such as back-ups, maintenance and help desk functions, the resources of most IT departments can become stretched very thin very fast. Many organisations today just don’t have the local staff to address these complex and time-consuming activities. As a result, many organisations, including Councils – are increasingly outsourcing their IT operations to organisations like Eagle.
Whakatane District Council (WDC) found themselves in that situation. With close to 180 staff, 50+ servers (37 Virtual and 16 Physical) and 250 PCs spread out over a half-dozen locations with a heterogeneous network of applications and platforms, their IT requirements had outgrown their ability to support their systems in-house. To help them maximise their investment in IT and move forward, they selected Eagle Technology Group’s Enterprise Solutions team to manage their IT department.
“We didn’t have access to the skills we needed in the community,” says Donald Hudson, Acting Information Manager at Whakatane DC. “Eagle had the skills that we needed and proposed a solution that provided the right mix of specialist capabilities, on-site support and project management.”
At Whakatane DC, Eagle takes care of all of the day-to-day activities. “They have three full-time people on-site,” says Hudson. “They manage back-ups, help Council staff with their PCs and are generally available to take care of our network. Before, we had an adhoc approach to user support. Eagle suggested that we implement the CA Unicenter Service Desk - which we did - and now we have defined systems in place to address user support issues as they occur.”
Another advantage of having a skilled outsourcing partner is the availability of expertise for special projects. “We needed to review and upgrade our compliance with International Accreditation NZ requirements in the area of backup and restore for our databases,” explains Hudson. “Eagle helped us manage the complex operation with a combination of physical and virtual servers running the CommVault backup application under VMware. Again we didn’t have the resources in place to undertake a project like this in-house. Having Eagle available gave us the skills we needed. Plus they have been helpful in other areas, such as creating customised reports from our SQL Server databases.”
“We have a number of different components in our network,” concludes Hudson. “One of the major benefits is that we now have a unified management of our various IT resources. For us, outsourcing our IT functions to Eagle has worked well.”
