Central Bedfordshire Council (CBC) is the local authority for Central Bedfordshire, who provide a range of standard services and support for residents, businesses, and visitors. As with many public sector organisations and local authorities specifically, Cloud offers that unique blend of access to turn key solutions, offsetting the need for traditional infrastructure but with the constant need to monitor cost to ensure it doesn’t break budgets. With most of its internal skill aligned to Microsoft related products. CBC required a partner to support its newly deployed Amazon Connect solution as well as associated AWS services. Given its existing relationship, coupled with their mature partner status, it was an obvious choice to partner with Softcat.
The Challenge
Like all organisations, a primary channel for user/customer engagement is the phone. For local authorities including CBC, Amazon Connect provides the optimum solution to overhaul traditional approaches to contact centres with a far more agile and scalable solution.
But as a new deployment, maintaining the solution, with the right skills was a key challenge for CBC, and as such this was the primary reason to engage a managed services partner.
With lots of previous Amazon Connect as well as wider AWS experience, the Softcat team were able to move quickly to provide advice and expertise to help CBC explore how a managed service would integrate with its teams and deliver the required 24x7x365 skills.
“With the majority of our infrastructure and applications deployed elsewhere, it made logical sense for us to explore a partnership to bring in turn-key skills to support our new Amazon Connect solution and associated AWS services. A quick conversation with Softcat, highlighted what other businesses were doing when faced with similar challenges, and the required solution was then obvious” Chris Trinder, Head of Technology, Central Bedfordshire Council
Critical Success Factors
- Scalable Amazon Connect and AWS expertise
- Guidance on how to efficiently evolve the use of AWS
- Incrementally evolve the platform
The Solution
With the objective clear, the engagement with CBC was similar to many other Softcat projects and thus highly repeatable – the key to not introducing lots of additional cost or delays.
The Softcat team, including project manager, lead site reliability engineer and Architect, started by assessing the current state of AWS platform and identifying the areas where we could improve it (security, architecture, reliability, cost).
Some typical minor changes were identified, such as removal of unused resources, from where onboarding into the managed service was completed.
Softcat’s management of the platform ensures automation and reliability by leveraging aspects such as Terraform was for Infrastructure as Code, with GitHub to automate deployment workflow through a series of CI/CD pipelines leveraging a range of AWS native services including AWS Systems Manager, AWS Backup, AWS Lambda, and CloudWatch. This provides the optimum blend of scalable service support coupled with cloud native services.
Highlights
- 24x7x365 Support from Softcat’s AWS engineering (SRE) team
- Seamless onboarding into Softcat support
- Blended of Softcat shared service automation (CI/CD) in conjunction with AWS native services
The Benefits
The primary benefit is Softcat’s proactive PlatformOps to ensure that CBC’s AWS platform remains efficient and effective. Associated benefits include:
- A highly automated and standardised AWS platform, with a Softcat 24x7x365 managed service for PlatformOps, to ensure continuous governance (architecture, commercial, security and reliability).
- The Softcat Cloud Management Platform to provide end-to-end visibility of the CBC AWS platform
- Adoption of Softcat standards for technology and process improvements enhanced the performance, resilience, and security of the AWS platform.
“We’re on a new journey with Softcat and so far the partnership has lived up-to our expectations, ensuring we have access to the highly skilled resources you would expected from a market leading AWS partner. We have total confidence that Softcat, as the AWS experts, will maintain our platform and evolve it where required.” Chris Trinder, Head of Technology, Central Bedfordshire Council.