The Palmerston North City Council says it has revived its ICT environment to improve reliability and performance of digital services for its 90,000 citizens.
“More and more of our citizens rely on digital services as part of their daily lives, so we needed to make sure they were always available,” says James Rowe, technology architect at the Palmerston North City Council.
He says the council has deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, which provided a reliable platform to run these services while increasing IT performance and allowing the team to focus on improving services to citizens.
Previously, the council experienced one or two system outages per month due to a range of factors including weather emergencies and legacy infrastructure.
This left its citizens unable to use many of the digital services they’ve grown to rely on, including utilities, dog registration and online bill and fee payments, explains Rowe.
The most important thing is it has freed up our internal developers and operations teams so we could really deliver results for the business
The combination of reduced outages, better performance and a simpler user interface, has the council’s 15-strong IT team to focus on delivering better outcomes for its departments and developing new digital services for the community.
“The business told us that we are more responsive than in the past,” Rowe tells CIO New Zealand. “The most important thing is it has freed up our internal developers and operations teams so we could really deliver results for the business.”
“It just means now, you are working not on the systems, you are working for the business.”
Nutanix says the deployment has also reduced the council’s reduce IT power consumption by 80 per cent and decrease the physical footprint of its datacentre by the same margin.
“Despite having limited resources, councils are expected to deliver reliable and high-quality digital services to a large population,” says Matt Young, senior vice President and head of Asia Pacific and Japan, Nutanix.
"This burden increases as citizens become more dependent on these services for their daily lives.
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“By implementing an enterprise cloud strategy, Palmerston North is modernising its approach and will be able to meet its citizens’ demands as they evolve,” says Young, in a statement.
Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz
Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap
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