Our Services

Business Relationship Management

STS provides a single point of contact for the partner/customer within the Shared Service, to be the primary contact point for effective service delivery and partner engagement, to understand the changing demands and requirements for effective resource planning and Establish and drive relevant governance to support the partner in planning and prioritising strategic investment based on detailed roadmaps and an understanding of cross-partner and IT enabling interdependencies.

Project Management and Business Analysis

STS delivers IT infrastructure related programmes and projects to planned dates and within budget across the Shared Service and ensures a high performing, customer focused, and cost-effective support service is provided across the supported organisations. We will also undertake investigative work to determine service opportunities, and specify effective business solutions, including improvements in information systems, data management, practices, organisation and equipment.

Procurement and Finance

We manage and lead on the procurement and contracts management function of Shared Technology Services, ensuring a high performing, customer focused and cost-effective support service is provided across all organisations we provide services to. We deliver an extensive portfolio of contracts, including leading on major ICT related tenders, from invitation to tender to award including transition into service delivery and business as usual.  STS provides supplier management functions to enable the successful delivery of BAU, projects and the ICT strategic roadmap across Shared Technology Services. STS will also deliver a comprehensive professional finance service that fulfils partners statutory, corporate and operational requirements, ensuring high quality financial services and management reporting to partners Councils, as well as managing the overall budget for Shared Technology Service.

Infrastructure – Networks

Network infrastructure installation, maintenance and management including routing, switching, firewalling, segregation, web filtering and Wi-Fi management. 10Gb Internet pipes are installed to each of the STS datacentres to handle all current and foreseeable future requirements for both cloud access and cloud backup capability, plus we have multiple 10Gb links between the STS Brent and Croydon datacentres to facilitate replication of the environments in each for recovery in the event of a datacentre outage. We provide a comprehensive proactive monitoring capability using enterprise grade, multi-capability tools to alert us to any potential issues that may arise. Alongside this we have resilience built-in to our critical network components to guard against single component failure causing outages or service disruption. We also provide VPN services for secure remote access and connections to third-party suppliers. Load balancing, Internet traffic filtering and web application filtering are amongst the other services included as standard.

Infrastructure – Platform and Datacentre

STS uses two council-located datacentres in Brent and Croydon to house the IT infrastructure. Redundant power supply and cooling are included to ensure a resilient stable environment with security-controlled access and CCTV to only allow authorised entry and monitor activity within. Platform services manage a virtualization environment for the server compute estate, 1 PB of SAN storage in each datacentre based on both SSD and HDD disks, server builds both physical and virtual, backup/restore services using a Rubrik cloud backup solution for both on-premise and Azure/O365 resource backups, print solution management with follow-me and remote printing capability, PKI management and certificate administration, Active Directory management and shared file/unstructured data management. More recently, Azure tenancy, resource and cost management has also been added to the portfolio of offerings in this area as the service expands into the cloud.

Infrastructure – Client Support

The Client Support team is responsible for end user device management covering a range of devices primarily laptops, desktops, tablets and thin-clients. Standard images are created to provide accelerated build times internally and via third-party partners. We also build, manage and maintain a remote desktop server estate (including Citrix), which provides access to the network for partner organisations and third-party support companies. A large-scale Direct Access solution is used by our internal client laptop estate and end user compute group policy management, application packaging, client estate management and maintenance through SCCM and InTune complete the comprehensive set of solutions for this secure but flexible client compute environment.

Infrastructure – Messaging and Collaboration

STS manages and maintains an email infrastructure based on on-premise Microsoft Exchange and Office365 across multiple tenancies. Comprehensive email filter management through Proofpoint and Mimecast give security against email attacks and spamming. Collaboration services support MS Teams for meetings, chat and telephony. A hosted 8x8 telephony solution is also in place supporting up to 10,000 users as well as multiple contact centres. Mobile device management supports the telephony and tablet devices using MS InTune and MobileIron.

Service Desk

The STS Service Desk offering uses a cloud-hosted Hornbill ITSM service for incident management and resolution, request management and resolution, and change and problem control. Users can interact with the service through a web portal including from mobile devices, email and also a 24x7x365 telephone service providing first-line support and escalation services. We work to agreed SLAs and provide comprehensive reporting against those SLAs. An engineer presence is maintained at all major offices to facilitate a face to face service for users as well.

Enterprise Support

This part of the service includes a technical design authority to review and validate technical solutions. Security also falls into the remit of this team and manages and reports on compliance with PSN, PCI, DSP and Cyber Essentials. The service also provides and manages critical response cover in the event of security-related incidents such as denial of service attacks and the release of zero-day vulnerability patches to ensure maintenance of the integrity of our estate and stored data. We also manage and report on device and operating system compliance to ensure we run on supported systems. STS maintains the technical risk register and authors the technical roadmap to determine the technologies to use and associated budgetary requirements for the future to maintain and advance the service. Change and problem management and the development of the ITSM environment are included here as well.