How Logpoint is helping Strata Service Solutions Ltd. increase Security and improve Operational efficiency
Strata Service Solutions Ltd. are delivering transformational IT services to three local authorities in the South West of England. A key tool in enabling this transformational change is the Logpoint SIEM solution, which allows Strata to increase Security and improve operational efficiency across East Devon District Council, Exeter City Council, and Teignbridge district Council.
Background
Strata Service Solutions Ltd., based across three sites in the South West of England, is a unique organisation. It focuses on delivering transformational IT Services into three local authorities, East Devon District Council, Exeter City Council, and Teignbridge District Council, while aiming to reduce costs, reduce risk and deliver the capability to support change. Strata started its life in 2014 and had been a huge success story. Strata operate with the commercial acumen of a business but without the profit incentive.
Strata is embedded in the three councils and enjoys close working relationships in all making it easier to deliver explementary services to the citizens throughout the associated districts . This collaboration also facilitates flexible working among the council’s staff and improves their individual interactions with technology, this makes for a more progressive and innovative working environment.
Strata support approximately 1,800 end user council officers and 300,000 citizens across the three councils.
Over the last 3 1/2 years, our use of Logpoint has grown considerably. We do not see it as a point product, but a solution that has grown with our business. And the fact that it is not only deployed for security makes it all the more valuable.
Laurence Whitlock, IT Director,
Strata Service Solutions Ltd.
The challenge
Once Strata had been established in 2014, the task started on consolidating three IT environments and teams into one. The decision was taken to adopt a VDI environment to enable users to access their work from any building or terminal within the three councils and at any time. The challenge for this is managing an environment that is both complex and susceptible to change.
Due to the nature of this complex environment, Strata identified that they needed a log management system to identify events happening across the systems and network, in order to learn from new incidents and then put proactive monitoring in place to identify reoccurrences in advance, offering end to end Continual Service Improvement.
“As an IT Director, the thing that helps me sleep at night is knowing that when the users of the three councils come into work in the morning, they have access to the systems they need to support the 300,000 citizens resident within the area. We have 1,800 users across the three authority sites, and we have calculated that for each hour users are unable to access the systems and service their citizens, the cost of lost productivity if circa £30,000. Hence, Strata Service Solutions Ltd. need to be aware 24 hours a day and 7 days a week of any risks to our networks that can impact our users and our citizens,” says Laurence Whitlock, IT Director at Strata.
Strata decided that the best way of managing these risks in a complex environment was to bring onboard a SIEM system to track all the activity that was going on across all different systems. Not only did Strata want this solution to manage logs from a security perspective, butbalso to provide proactive operational management, delivering information to other areas of the business such as infrastructure and support that could impact the business systems and systems availability.
The solution
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