CDDFRS
CASE STUDY
A Brief Introduction
County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service has strengthened its IT infrastructure with the help of technology experts ITPS, to allow it to deliver more efficient and resilient 999 call handling and other services.
The eight month project involved a complete upgrade of the IT infrastructure at the Framwellgate Moor HQ site and migration to the new HQ building on Belmont Business Park, Durham, which opened for business on 1st September 2014.
The Challenge
Creating and implementing the new infrastructure while working alongside partners who were installing a new mobilisation platform and replacing back office systems, made this a complex project with far-reaching implications for the service.
Our Command and Control centre alone handles more than 13,000 emergency calls a year so there was no scope for any interruption in service and together we achieved the aim of making it business as usual for more than 600 staff across our 16 sites
ITPS Approach
ITPS director Mark Mason added: “We were pleased to have brought such an important project for the Service in on time and within the fixed price we had committed to. CDDFRS knew we understood their business and had faith in our track record for service delivery, so winning this new contract was a real mark of confidence in our abilities.
Upgrading the IT infrastructure is part of a series of integrated projects that will improve efficiency and underpin the development of services the authority provides to thousands of people, and we are proud that they chose a North East business to play its part in that.”
Results
STRENGTHENED RECOVERY
The Service’s performance and information systems manager, Keith Lazzari, said: “ITPS has been our managed services partner for some years, with a team based onsite at our HQ, working alongside our in-house IT people. When we needed to implement a reliable, future-proof IT infrastructure to take us forward, they won the work in a competitive tender situation.
The new infrastructure has strengthened disaster recovery capabilities with the creation of an onsite virtual server environment with backup to ITPS’s own high security data centre, and installation of a wireless network across the service’s 16 remote sites.
“ITPS has helped us to invest for greater resilience and protect our previous investment by re-using existing hardware and soware across the service, giving us an IT roadmap that will support future development.”
Keith Lazzari
Performance and Information Systems Manager, CDDFRS
Get In Touch
If you’d like to chat about how we can support your IT needs, about working for us or indeed discuss our charitable efforts, we’d love to hear from you. Fill out the form to get in touch.
