In the Spotlight: Aberdeen City Council

Scotland’s third largest city is transforming its schools with digital learning. It relies on the Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform to assure exceptional learning experiences to learners, faculty, and staff while streamlining IT operations.

Challenge

A national goal to provide every student with a mobile device and Wi-Fi connectivity put Aberdeen City Council on a path to a network refresh. Its schools had older wireless networks that lacked the capacity and coverage to support 1:1 learning for 26,500 learners.

“In Scotland, we have a goal to reach of a one device per learner ratio,” council Infrastructure architect Iain Pilbeam-Cornfield told Think Digital Partners. “The problem with that, of course, is infrastructure. We were struggling to achieve anything like that. So to get that sort of connectivity for them, we needed more density and more coverage.

“We wanted to move to Wi-Fi 6/6E to support a higher device density and take a cloud-first and AIOps approach to simplify network operations.”

The IT team also wanted to strengthen security, working toward Zero Trust network access controls for both school-issued and personal devices, as well as the ability to integrate with other apps like ServiceNow to further streamline operations. It conducted an extensive evaluation and testing to determine the right fit wired and wireless network.

Solution

Aberdeen City Council chose the Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform for its ability to deliver AI for IT operations (AIOps) that assures exceptional digital experiences at its 67 schools and 75 corporate sites.

Juniper AP34 Wireless Access Points deliver high-performance Wi-Fi 6/6E in classrooms and school buildings while Juniper AP45 Wireless Access Points provide fast, reliable connectivity outdoors. Juniper EX4650, EX4400, and EX4100 Switches are used for the core and access switching. Juniper Mist Access Assurance enforces Zero Trust network access controls for school-issued, BYOD, and guest devices. The Marvis Virtual Network Assistant provides insight and automated actions to speed troubleshooting and operations.

The IT team used Juniper Mist cloud to onboard, configure, and manage the campus fabric. With automation, the team can migrate a school to the new Juniper Wi-Fi in 30 minutes. “We have minimal downtime thanks to Juniper’s zero touch provisioning,” said Pilbeam-Cornfield.

Outcomes

Educators quickly realised that all learners in their classroom had fast, reliable Wi-Fi to access digital learning. Previously, only a limited number of learners could connect their laptops at once. “One teacher triumphantly came out of the classroom and raised her arms in victory for getting all her learners connected at the same time,” said Pilbeam-Cornfield.

Comprehensive AIOps simplifies operations and improves visibility into network, app, and device performance. “Marvis is really helpful to identify and resolve problems before users are impacted,” said Pilbeam-Cornfield.

IT plans to integrate its Juniper network with ServiceNow to automate firmware upgrades on switches, which will streamline the change management processes, “cutting hours of work to minutes.”

“What we really want to get to is a minimal admin overhead,” said Pilbeam-Cornfield. “So that we can have people spending time on either innovation or customer engagement and really understanding what we need. If look at any of the metrics in Juniper, they’re all talking about, ‘how’s that end user feel?’”

• 100% reduction in network-related trouble tickets to our service desk
• 2x Wi-Fi coverage and capacity with no increase in power usage over old equipment
• 30 minutes downtime to deploy new Juniper switches and Wi-Fi at a primary school
• 31,000 learners, educators, and staff use the Juniper network