Case Study: Town of Stratford

Population: 52,270
Sites: Town Hall, Police Headquarters, Public Safety Building

• Reduced Risk

• Optimized Service Quality

• Improved Operational Effectiveness

The Town of Stratford had standalone PC workstations spread across the town facilities with each PC requiring individual attention and maintenance. In addition, each building had individual, standalone internet connections subject to failure with no redundancy or backup. Surveillance cameras at schools and other sites throughout the town were not accessible in real-time by the police, raising concerns about safety and responsiveness.

The Town wanted to virtualize the workstations so that they could be centrally managed, with redundancy and up-to-date anti-virus protections. In order to do this, however, the whole IT infrastructure and network connectivity needed to be upgraded.

• Flagship in partnership with the town designed, built and now manages a new data center infrastructure with individual building firewalls & switches. This customized design combined several different technologies to create a secure, quality, and flexible system which enabled the virtualization of the town’s workstations.

• Flagship, working with various network vendors, also designed and implemented a “dark fiber” network which connects Town Hall, Police Headquarters and the Public Safety Building. The network also has redundancy built in so that in case of an outage, affected lines will automatically fail over to backup lines using different technology.

Workstations have been virtualized and maintained centrally by Town staff, significantly reducing the costs of repair and software upgrades and security. Flagship manages the core infrastructure reducing the reliance on town staff to do it and assuring a high level of remote monitoring and management. Surveillance cameras at remote sites can now be accessed live, in real-time, as well as streamed recording for later review, resulting in faster response to incidents such as accidents, disputes or crimes in progress. The system now provides a strong, secure perimeter defense against penetration or malware attacks.