When poor connection isn’t an option: building network resilience for the mission-critical public sector

In recent years, the public sector has needed to respond more than any other industry to the changes brought on by the pandemic. Today, conversations about the impact of COVID-19 on digital transformation in the sector have moved on from reactive discussions around implementation to a re-think of how technology best supports a future hybrid world. Three years on, like other industries, digitised ways of working haven’t disappeared. With increasing expectations among citizens and employees, government entities recognise that improving the resilience and quality of digital services is critical to better serving the public.

That said, moving to digital service delivery, for many public organisations, has proven to be a delicate process. Ensuring always on connectivity in the high-stakes environments that many of these organisations face on a daily basis is mission critical. Unlike the private sector, there are often no alternative services so there’s increasing pressure on IT teams to ensure a continual first rate digital experience. How then, can public sector businesses continue to deliver this and what are the ongoing challenges they need to overcome?

Uninterrupted connectivity

When the pandemic hit, for the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Services (SCTS) social distancing restrictions created challenges, in particular for maintaining trials involving juries. SCTS commissioned cinemas as Remote Jury Centres so that juries could continue to contribute to criminal cases while adhering to social distancing guidance.

In addition, remote court hearings were put in place so that criminal and civil business court business could continue.

Fast forward to today and while the majority of its Remote Jury Centres have been decommissioned as COVID-19 restrictions have eased and the rates of infection have reduced, they are still being used to assist in a court recovery programme and virtual hearings still remain an important part of the SCTS’ future business strategy.

The use of videoconferencing tools naturally adds another level of complexity to court hearings. For example, quality issues with witness statements in particularly sensitive or high-profile trials could result in witnesses having to repeat the process. Such a scenario could erode public confidence in the courts and tribunals and create reputational damage.

Where networking issues might affect trust and reputation within virtual courts, the same issues could have life-threatening consequences in the medical sector. Within hospitals, the network is the central nervous system that connects doctors to the right patient service application as well as remote workers to their colleagues and citizens via key collaboration and process apps. Network resilience is also central to facilitating more mission critical applications, like telesurgery, which relies on networks to receive surgical real-time data and connect patients and surgeons who are geographically distant. Any network disruptions that arise directly impacts the quality of patient care, resulting in potentially dangerous implications.

Whilst a different use of technology, both of these use cases have one thing in common – connectivity needs to be unfaltering and constant. Ultimately, hindered digital experiences can cause frustration and a lack of trust in public sector services.

Seeing the “bigger picture”

So, what’s happening under the IT hood? An increased reliance on a complex enterprise infrastructure made up of the Internet, SaaS and the cloud means that public sector businesses are managing networks and systems outside of their view – and often therefore their control.

Relying on these external dependencies within the DNA of enterprise architectures has resulted in significant blind spots for IT teams, impacting their ability to make decisions and remediate issues that affect the end-user digital experience. Where things like latency or outages might annoy private sector consumers and cause them to move onto competitor services, in a public setting, there is often no alternative and the consequences may be more serious. For the tribunal services like SCTS, in particular, disrupted interactions for civil servants working from home and remote juries could prevent key evidence or important testimonials from being processed for a case. And for remote medicine use cases, not having access to patient records can considerably inhibit emergency care.

What’s more, finding and fixing outages in these external environments on a reactive basis leaves little room for innovation, impacting IT’s time and resources that could otherwise improve services for users, patients and employees. 

Supporting mission critical applications

To continue delivering exceptional quality of service and quickly fix problems that arise, IT teams need to see, understand and fix problems across the entire digital supply chain from user to application to network – whether that’s remote Wi-Fi, employee devices, internal firewalls, switches, routing bandwidth or external ISP and cloud providers.

Having access to the “bigger picture” can save networking teams a lot of time when getting to the root of an issue. Having the right tools and monitoring solutions in place, therefore, is vital for public sector businesses to continue delivering mission critical services online.

For example, for the SCTS, deploying agent-based monitoring capabilities has enabled them to navigate any network issues and gain real-time visibility of remote networks involved in the delivery of remote hearings. Using data collected from said agents has allowed its IT teams to pin-point issues around latency, jitter and packet loss – and ultimately determine whether any performance issues were occuring within their own IT perimeter, or beyond, and if beyond, where precisely.

Outside of the legal system, visibility over networks has also proven essential for mission critical applications in healthcare, such as remote medicine that also requires high network resilience to deliver medications and provide care to patients at home. Being able to monitor networks facilitating remote medicine could avoid potentially harmful disruptions. For example, poor connection could stop critical patient data from getting to the closest healthcare facilities – in this case, greater visibility into network performance could save lives.

As well as helping to solve real-time connectivity issues, this level of visibility has a key role in helping public sector businesses improve long-term resilience. For SCTS, in particular, end-to-end visibility has offered them much more than network performance monitoring. They could look at the performance within their employee environments, including device CPU loads and memory utilisation – and how these played into wider performance. Using these insights, SCTS changed how it plans its hardware upgrade programme to focus on specific computers.

Looking to the future, proactively monitoring end-to-end paths at this level, can even support public sector businesses with moving from a reactive approach to optimising user experience toward a proactive approach. So IT teams can proactively identify new or developing issues and make necessary changes before application performance drops below desired levels.

Ultimately, having undisrupted connectivity is vital to better serve the public and offer digitised experiences that improve accessibility when it comes to legal or medical processes. Ensuring this requires having the right monitoring tools and solutions in place, so that public sector organisations can continue supporting public needs and unlock new potential for remote care and support.