Oudsbergen achieves greater availability and efficiency

The Oudsbergen municipality was looking for a partner who wanted to help think about the ICT architecture, develop the vision together and take over management of the servers. That is why the municipality decided to work with VanRoey. As a result, employees of the municipal services can now count on an optimally managed, well-secured and maximally available infrastructure. In this way, citizens will also get a better, more efficient service.

Public institutions also seek maximum efficiency and availability. This is especially true as services for citizens are increasingly provided online. But even behind the scenes and at the counters, the systems absolutely must not falter. So the IT infrastructure must not fail.

Better to prevent problems than cure
At the Oudsbergen municipality, there are two employees in charge of day-to-day operational ICT, providing support to PC users and handling application management. Infrastructure management required reinforcement by external specialists. The small size of the IT department was also a problem during holiday periods. The municipality therefore decided to engage VanRoey as its IT partner. Oudsbergen's internal system manager now looks for the best solutions for the organisation together with VanRoey every time.

Monthly visits and online monitoring
VanRoey now manages the entire server environment of the Oudsbergen municipality and handles the complex aspects of system management. Services are provided according to the agreements of a service plan. This includes a monthly visit by a permanent VanRoey expert.

All non-urgent questions and problems that we cannot solve ourselves, we collect and present to our contact person from VanRoey during his monthly visit," says Marc Willems, system administrator at the Oudsbergen municipality. "But generally there are very few problems thanks to the proactive monitoring of our network and server environment by VanRoey via their cloud system ivITa. This way, they also install all updates and antivirus software, check whether there is enough disk space and take care of the backup and security. Sound security is obviously important for a municipality because we work with citizens' private data."

Security and availability
Oudsbergen's server environment was installed by VanRoey some time ago and now comprises ten virtual servers running on three physical servers. Should one of the physical systems fail, the others can take over immediately. In addition, all data is also copied to a remote location. Thus, the municipality has a well-secured and redundant infrastructure on which all the software applications of the municipality and CPAS run. "Stability is essential for us. We need to be able to count on everything working properly at all times. That is why it is so important for us to work with a partner who keeps everything up to date and knows our environment well," says Marc Willems.

Better services to citizens
The 60 or so employees who use the ICT infrastructure notice very little of the service provided by VanRoey. "And that's fine," argues Karla Louis. "The more invisible VanRoey is to our end users the better, because that means there are few problems."

When computer users have a problem, they first contact our own ICT service and we call in VanRoey when we can't solve it ourselves. This runs smoothly for everyone. The final objective of the service by VanRoey is, of course, that we can serve the citizen better by working more efficiently internally. If counter staff cannot access their applications due to network problems, they cannot, for example, help a citizen who needs a new identity card. Similarly, in the backoffice, we cannot perform our services for citizens efficiently when there are problems with the ICT infrastructure."

Online counter
The security of an external service provider like VanRoey proved to be a good choice for Oudsbergen. Consequently, the service plan will continue to run in the long term. "In the long run, we are thinking of expanding a digital counter and for that too, we are security and availability very important."