Digital, progressive, flexible, close to the citizen: The administration in the federal, state and local authorities should become "more digital", is often overwhelmed and only moves at a snail's pace. The IT landscape in particular is jagged: many systems are old and often not cloud-capable. The task now is to standardize the digital infrastructure with the right solution and make it fit for future expansions.
From a technical point of view, public administrations are often at least as complex as large companies. Tens of thousands of rooms, several thousand server racks and several million software installations quickly come together. In addition, support is often organized in a decentralized manner and there are many local people responsible.
The challenges are enormous: Authorities often have high security requirements because they manage sensitive information and personal data. They have an extremely high need for digitization because many processes and procedures are still paper-based or systems are not allowed or able to exchange data with each other. As a result, there is often a lack of an overall overview of the IT infrastructure and the possibility of optimally utilizing systems and avoiding unnecessary procurement. If you don't know what you have where, you can only start projects after a time-consuming inventory.
IT infrastructure management as the key to success
The advancing digitization requires that the IT of the public sector is continuously expanded and optimized. Important elements here are flexible, reliable solutions that support the management of these infrastructures in a meaningful way and at the same time increase efficiency and security. This is the only way to achieve the goal of digitization with the available resources and tight budgets. Public IT departments are therefore increasingly relying on central tools for documentation and management of the entire infrastructure. The advantages are obvious.
Central tools for documentation and management
- Complete overview of existing systems, energy requirements, capacities, software versions, bandwidths, etc. with one click
- Overview of dependencies and connections of the various IT and telecommunications systems and cloud services as well as redundancies and backup paths
- Planning tool for planned changes/extensions of the IT infrastructure with assumption of the target as the actual state after the measure has been taken
- Project and process management for all classic move, add and change tasks as well as other conversion measures including service provider control
- Effective support for troubleshooting in the event of failures and predictive maintenance
- Merging of data from different systems and consolidation in one tool as a "single point of truth"
- Possibility of connecting autodiscovery and ERP systems (such as SAP ECC) as well as other critical systems
- Effort-based or usage-based billing and billing for various authorities and departments
- Technical request handling, order initiation, goods receipt and warehouse management for IT equipment
Municipal Administration
The city administration of a large German city had the requirement to convert the classic extension technology to Voice-over-IP during ongoing operations. To do this, the entire LAN network infrastructure had to be recorded, expanded and rebuilt. This was no small project: 50.000 rooms with 200.000 data sockets, 700.000 cables and more than 1.000 servers were affected. A central requirement for the conversion was also to implement a central ticket and billing system in order to efficiently manage the ICT infrastructure. With FNT Command as the central CMDB, it was not only possible to meet the specified requirements, but also to introduce intelligent autorouting that calculates as few hops and short patch connections as possible (to minimize delays when telephoning via VoIP). This also takes into account requirements that do not allow optimal connections ad hoc due to a lack of port capacities and automatically carries out autorouting if the network topology changes. After the digitization of the telephony technology and the good experience with the changeover, the city planned its LAN infrastructure entirely with FNT Command. For the IT service manager, this has the additional advantage that IT and TC can be managed using a central tool.
police and judiciary
A state authority uses FNT Command to manage all IT assets of the security bodies. This includes not only servers, clients, printers and smartphones, but also emergency vehicles, SIM cards and body cams, computer components such as SSDs and CPUs as well as the operating system and installed applications. The demands on access management are particularly high here, because only authorized persons are allowed access so that no operations or persons are endangered.
Conclusion
Federal, state and local authorities often have a complex system of different IT and telecommunications systems in use, which are often highly fragmented and often outdated. Modern ICT infrastructure management not only provides the necessary overview to be able to modernize and digitize more efficiently, but also the flexibility and planning options to be able to optimize processes in a targeted manner. With FNT Command, you can do this without interrupting your daily work.
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About FNT
Efficient, trouble-free and flexible infrastructures are the basis for all digital business processes and applications, be it Smart Cities, Industry 4.0 or 5G. With the cloud-based software solutions from FNT GmbH, companies and authorities record, document and manage their complex and hybrid IT, telecommunications and data center infrastructures - from the physical level to the business service, manufacturer-independently and according to a uniform data model.