San Diego steps up cloud, remote support, IT service management — GCN

San Diego measures up cloud, remote assist, IT provider management

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• By Stephanie Kanowitz
• Sep 20, 2021

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The city of San Diego is starting an IT revamp with a new managed solutions deal that focuses on information facilities, cloud, support-desk aid and a protection functions center (SOC).

The new contract, which the town signed with Zensar Systems previous month, replaces managed support supplier contracts from 2012 that achieved the stop of their time period. Because technologies and new business demands experienced progressed noticeably considering that then, the town saw a chance to implement lessons realized from the previous contracts and perform with stakeholders to establish specifications for a new request for proposals for enterprise compute and office services, San Diego CIO Jonathan Behnke explained.

“The new RFP offered an chance to increase client pleasure, boost the IT providers redundancy and agility, minimize the city’s danger exposure, travel ongoing complex innovation — and we actually were on the lookout to obtain the best products and services for the greatest benefit,” Behnke claimed.

Specifically, his group sought to raise assist-desk self-products and services, greater help remote personnel and cell equipment, centralize IT services administration and cloud use and modernize infrastructure as a way to address the city’s increasing electronic footprint. Given that 2012 its aid-desk calls have increased by about 67{17904359e11cbfc70ac4d65bb875d3d2975e2e10411d6a84f2c5acc6e507ba2f} to 60,000 phone calls yearly the selection of laptops, desktops and other devices have grown by practically 30{17904359e11cbfc70ac4d65bb875d3d2975e2e10411d6a84f2c5acc6e507ba2f} to 19,000 models servers spiked 68{17904359e11cbfc70ac4d65bb875d3d2975e2e10411d6a84f2c5acc6e507ba2f} to about 1,300 databases have increased by 70{17904359e11cbfc70ac4d65bb875d3d2975e2e10411d6a84f2c5acc6e507ba2f} and storage has ballooned just about 280{17904359e11cbfc70ac4d65bb875d3d2975e2e10411d6a84f2c5acc6e507ba2f}.

The scope of the new contract, valued at $122 million and very good for four many years, is two-fold, explained Harjott Atrii, the company’s govt vice president and head of its Digital Foundation Products and services and Hello-Tech and Producing segment. A single aspect will involve business compute expert services (ECS), which is the migration of workloads to the city’s data heart or to the cloud and bringing in models these as pay back-as-you-go, as-a-service and end result-based pricing.

By way of ECS, the company will supply assist for public cloud that will give new expert services these kinds of as catastrophe recovery and details storage and assistance much more than 1,000 city servers and affiliated storage and software internet hosting a lot more than 300 town programs.

The next section of the agreement handles electronic office providers, such as complex support-desk assist. The metropolis needs to develop a lot more protected, productive, responsive technological innovation companies that can respond to all the IT desires, Atrii reported.

To accomplish this, Zensar will give a central get hold of position for all IT providers, finish-consumer gadget support and enhanced mobile device assistance for about 6,000 metropolis- and personnel-owned devices. San Diego additional 2,200 laptops and 3,000 virtual desktop cases in 2020, Behnke reported, so the assistance workforce must be a lot quicker at resolving issues for distant team.

“The pandemic has pushed all organizations to count more on virtual collaboration and assembly applications, and it was crucial to us to ensure that the new deal experienced exceptional support from individuals spots,” he stated. “New user knowledge-monitoring resources will detect problems much more promptly and deliver opportunities to solve them right before the consumer notices or phone calls the enable desk. It will also deliver appointment scheduling for assistance-desk companies to make it much more effortless for staff to address problems within just convenient time windows.”

Whilst Zensar is headquartered in India, it will supply these products and services as a result of its U.S.-dependent shipping and delivery operations management heart in Westborough, Mass., and a command heart in Dallas that will monitor devices, facts facilities and the cloud.

Associates include things like Amazon Net Providers, Google Cloud System and Hewlett-Packard, Atrii mentioned.

Much more transparency, accountability and security are additional targets for San Diego. Since all managed company vendors, or MSPs, will get the job done in a centralized system, “the city will have far more expanded knowledge to do deeper dives into the assistance fulfillment, incident reaction [and] services amounts,” Behnke said. “Expanded details aids us push extra accountability for products and services, and new tools give us bigger visibility throughout the technological innovation ecosystem…. The new deal also makes stability a precedence and integrates it throughout all solutions to maintain our MSPs much more accountable for stability best tactics and shipping and delivery throughout all of the services.”

The do the job aligns with the city’s fiscal 2022-26 IT System. San Diego split IT services between a few groups: Town staff will take care of company administration and electronic method, CGI is getting on company application advancement and management, and Zensar will presume assistance-desk, community and mobile phone as nicely as info centre and cloud do the job from Atos, which experienced been providing services considering the fact that 2012.

The work also builds on a contract Zensar gained from the metropolis in 2018 to guide with security, knowledge management, functions management and the addition of up coming-era engineering these kinds of as computer software-described architectures.

“Security is a important element of all IT solutions, and they’re definitely going to be capable to make on that perform that they’ve accomplished on the network and SOC deal,” Behnke said. “[They’ll] enable us go on to generate best tactics into cloud transformation and refreshing our data middle hardware.