ASE Consulting provided Telecoms Business Continuity Management to Her Majesty's Prison Service over an eighteen month period.
Background
As part of network modernisation initiative, HM Prison Service (HMPS) replaced its low speed ISDN back up service for 140 of its custodial sites with a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite back up service.
Approach
ASE provided their solution definition service and played a key role in the development of this business continuity strategy and its implementation.
Drawing on comparable experience gained elsewhere within UK government ASE provided technical consultancy and programme management capability as well as managing supplier delivery and performance levels.
ASE applied delivery improvement services by working with systems integrators, telecommunications providers, satellite providers and niche vendors. ASE developed and augmented the satellite service and programme managed its implementation.
This work has included:
- An assessment of data volumes, review of network contention ratios and an analysis of service loss risk and business impact analysis in order to determine optimum pooled bandwidth for the VSAT business continuity service
- Performance benchmarking of critical applications across satellite connection to determine the impact of latency and product assessment of acceleration technologies in a lab environment
- Technical consultancy to HMPS and assurance of the service provider's solution, also testing and acceptance of each installation's automated failover
- Supplier performance management - throughout the supply chain
- Managing the deployment of the central service and local 1.8m dish satellite installations in accordance with PRINCE2 methodology. This work has comprised commissioning enabling works for which HMPS is responsible, planning application, Health and Safety assessments, logistics and managing supplier installations.
- Development of the annual business continuity test strategy and its first implementation
- Many real-time applications are subject to performance degradation resulting from the high-latency and jitter associated with the use of VSAT services. ASE has worked with suppliers to refine their configurations to minimise the impacts of the latency as far as is possible.
- ASE needed to ensure that the provision of a Wide Area network satellite back up for HMPS integrated within the broader strategic network planning. ASE provided solution definition services to ensure that WAN optimisation, which is being introduced in order to contain operational spend on the primary network, was trialled for improving performance over the high-latency satellite circuits.
Outcome
- ASE provided senior-level Project Management for the implementation of the VSAT project.
- ASE Managed the multiple supplier relationships
- ASE provided the technical consultancy and delivered a successful VSAT satellite back up service.