Appurity helps Greater London Authority deploy mobility solutions to optimise Office 365.

27 November 2016

The Organisation

The Greater London Authority runs Britain’s capital city. More than 7 million people live within its catchment, and millions more come and go every day. Its five functional bodies include Transport for London, Fire and Emergency Planning and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. The city is also one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, with more than 17 million international visitors.

The Challenge

The Greater London Authority (GLA) needed to move to a new mobility platform, as its BlackBerry 5 deployment was going end-of-life. As well as introducing BlackBerry with Android for Work, with Good Secure EMM, the Authority wanted to allow staff to use their own devices, with MobileIron device and application management to containerise work-related content.

Appurity planned and implemented the complex migration, in partnership with the GLA team. This included an audit and optimisation of all the licences relating to the Authority’s mobile fleet, helping to ensure full and efficient compliance.

“Working with Appurity gave us a more strategic approach. They are technology agnostic, so they have been able provide guidance and support across our entire mobile estate. We needed a partner that understood our licensing needs as well as the technology itself, and Appurity proved to be proactive and responsive in dealing with every aspect.”​ – James Waite, Senior Project Manager for Cloud Technologies, Greater London Authority.

The Solution

For many local authorities, the opportunities created by the cloud have been tempered by the security risks. Even with the relentless pressure to find yet more efficiencies, the obvious productivity benefits made possible by cloud solutions such as Office 365 have to be weighed against the potential vulnerabilities that a more mobile and remotely accessible infrastructure can introduce.

This was the challenge faced by the Greater London Authority. Its mobile estate is a vital tool in the delivery of services to the hugely diverse population of more than 7 million people it serves, as well as to the millions of visitors that pass through the capital every year.

But with its BlackBerry 5 fleet going end-of-life, and rising demand from many of the Authority’s 850 users for their personal devices to be used for work, a fresh approach to mobile security and device management was needed.

At the same time, the GLA’s investment in Office 365 was set to enable much higher productivity and improved collaboration across the organisation – but only if compliant, easily managed security could be put in place to protect the increasingly complex estate.

The Result

James Waite, Senior Project Manager for Cloud Technologies for the GLA, explains that one of the biggest challenges was around licensing.

 “It’s always one of the most tricky aspects of any migration,” he says. “You want to ensure that you don’t simply abandon licences that are still compliant, and that you are not acquiring more new licences than you need.

“We needed a partner that understood our licensing needs as well as the technology itself, and Appurity proved to be proactive and responsive in dealing with every aspect.”

As well as resolving licensing issues that were creating problems with the deployment of the BlackBerry estate, Appurity worked with the GLA to consolidate the complete licensing portfolio, and to establish a roadmap for future licensing requirements.

 “Working with Appurity gave us a more strategic approach,” says James Waite. “They are technology agnostic, so they have been able provide guidance and support across our entire mobile estate.

“They have helped us unify our device and application management, integrating MobileIron and Android for Work, together with Good Secure EMM for the BlackBerry fleet.”

The GLA provides users with a catalogue of device options, grouped according to job role and grade. However, the move to embrace BYOD principles, with the containerisation enabled by MobileIron, also enables the authority to be flexible, allowing staff to use their own devices if they want to.

“Skills transfer was a key focus for the project,” adds James Waite. “The Appurity team worked on site with our own systems engineers and they have been able to take on the new environment with little or no fall-out.

“The response of the Appurity team is fast and they stay till the job is done. It’s been a rare experience of really professional account management.”