Campbelltown City Council

Digital transformation needs to become top priority for all organisations globally if they are to remain relevant and effective in the corporate world. Underpinning digital transformation is network infrastructure. Aging and obsolete infrastructure and architecture opens an organisation up to a whole host of problems, from increasing vulnerability to malware and weakened security issues to not being able to support wireless connectivity.

Refreshing architecture and reshaping the traditional platforms of information and communication technology (ICT) is key to produce infrastructure that improves customer experience, optimises operations, and ramps up business growth.

By leveraging Cisco’s industry-leading range of products, we ensure customers are provided with customisable solutions to meet their unique requirements, accelerate their digital transformation, and ensure their business continuity and growth.

Background

Campbelltown City Council is a local government entity located in south-western Sydney, NSW. More than 170,000 people across 36 suburbs now call the city of Campbelltown home, making it one of the 10 largest local government areas in NSW. With many culturally and linguistically diverse communities, Campbelltown City Council offers countless city opportunities within a natural setting.

Known for being the cultural heart of south west Sydney, the council boasts an array of amenities and services designed with their community in mind: A contemporary arts centre, including a sculpture garden and Japanese gardens, community library and swimming pool, Play Centre designed for both adults and children, bowling club to a breath-taking botanic garden.

The council plans on taking full advantage of Campbelltown’s geographical location and embraces their history, while celebrating the opportunities that modernisation offers. They are investing in their future by placing great emphasis on technology and innovation to ensure the city is ahead of the game, while providing the community access to opportunities and ensuring that they celebrate their people and the city.

Problem

Campbelltown City Council required architecture and engineering services to rebuild the existing Wide Area Network and needed to update and modernise their aging, end-of-life security infrastructure. There was also a need to provide a solution to cater for remote working capability for a modern, geographically decentralised workforce.

The council also wanted to improve their wireless infrastructure throughout their community sites to enable secure, reliable, and high-speed connectivity for an increasingly mobile workforce. This included areas such as the Civic Centre, where the head office is located so that the executive team could be productive, and in the libraries and leisure centres so that the community members could also have access to this connectivity.

Solution

To help Campbelltown City Council find a solution to meet their unique requirements, we provided a complete transformation of their existing Wide Area Network, leveraging off the council’s preferred fibre network provider. This remediated challenges with the old network, which was slow, unreliable, and disruptive to business productivity.

Cisco Next-Gen Firepower Threat Defence (FTD) and Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) were utilised to provide multi-layered security services across the Campbelltown City Council Wide Area Network (WAN), computing facilities, network components and all Campbelltown City Council end users.

As this was the migration of current end-of-life security platform to an up-to-date security infrastructure, with the purpose of extending the protection across both on-premise and TPG Private Cloud data centre, Campbelltown City Council decided to implement a network security infrastructure to protect both data centres with high availability.

This deployment enabled the council’s TPG Cloud data centre to become the primary internet breakout point, with the on-premise data centre at Campbelltown City Council Civic building being the secondary/standby internet link for redundancy. Internet redundancy will provide minimal down time for the council’s end users and public accessible resources and services hosted in Campbelltown City Council data centre. The council now has high availability, granular access control of the traffic up to application layer, including URL filtering, Application Visibility and Control (AVC) and Advanced Malware Protection for Networks (AMP for Networks). The council also has deeper insight and access to centralised end-to-end tracking, analytics, reporting and management.

Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) helped Campbelltown City Council’s address their issues with growing challenges of securing and controlling web traffic.

The Web Security solution brings together two Cisco Virtual WSA to provide the security, configuration management and reporting function, as well as redundancy. The new virtual WSAs replace the old WSAs appliance that were running outdated software code. The newly deployed WSAs are integrated into both data centres in Campbelltown City Council Civic building and TPG Cloud. With this innovative web security deployment and its real-time threat security intelligence, the council now has strong protection and complete control of their web traffic, safeguarding their business against the ever-changing and challenging threat landscape.

Cisco Next Generation switching/routing technologies ensured smart architecture, high-speed and redundant connectivity throughout the network.

Tightly integrated with the Firepower FTD is the Next-Generation IPS (NGIPS), which provides the council with visibility, automation, flexibility, and the scalability needed to mitigate the latest threats. Auto-tuning of IPS functions helped to ensure that IPS signatures in use reflect the reality of Campbelltown City Council environment. As the NGIPS function passively scans network traffic, it enhances visibility by identifying what exists in the environment, not just based on assumption. IPS rules are tuned accordingly. This passive detection also extends visibility into Campbelltown City Council environment:

Endpoint operating systems and their versions
Mobile devices
Virtual machine communications
Other network devices, including routers, VoIP phones, networked printers, and more.

Additionally, Cisco Firepower NGIPS includes Security Intelligence, with analysis of IP, DNS, and URL data, and identification of indicators of compromise (IoCs). NGIPS was enabled within FTD to provide Campbelltown City Council with a highly effective threat prevention and full contextual awareness of users, infrastructure, applications, and content to detect multi-vector threats and automate defence response.

Cisco Next-Generation technologies, such as FTD Firewalls, Cisco WSA and Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) provided the backbone for the modernisation and the upliftment of the security infrastructure of Campbelltown City Council. The agility of this environment was proven through the rapid provisioning of hundreds of remote connectivity profiles for the workforce during the early onset of the COVID-19 crisis. This was instrumental in maintaining business continuity during the global pandemic, while providing the workforce with seamless and secure connectivity to the work network.

Conclusion and outcome

Cisco and Outcomex played a key part in supporting the digital transformation of Campbelltown City Council. By helping to bring the strategic vision of the council to life, Outcomex provided Campbelltown City Council with a network and infrastructure which was refreshed and a smart, simplified, sustainable and secure ICT environment.

The council has realised productivity gains through a disruption-free, high-speed WAN since mid-2020. The ICT team has been able to focus on accelerating project delivery and value-added services rather than providing ongoing break-fix support for networking issues.

A modern, intelligent, and resilient security posture has resulted in NIL security breaches, even with staff accessing the work network remotely. The flexibility of this ICT environment has allowed Council to adopt multiple flexible work practices previously not available to its staff. Campbelltown City Council’s technology assets are now well protected and have extremely capable engineering support through Outcomex during these times.

Given the success of the project, Campbelltown City Council plans on expanding and standardising their overall wireless solution in 2021. Through the implementation and deployment of the Cisco Meraki wireless platform, staff, guests, and members of the community will enjoy an improved wireless experience free from poor coverage/speeds and drop-outs.

The Cisco Meraki MR46 platform offers Wi-Fi 6 performance, can support more devices connected to the network at faster speeds. It also provides improved return on investment by negating the need for expensive wireless controllers, providing business intelligence insights through its onboard analytics and simplified management of the wireless infrastructure. It also futureproofs integration of Internet of Things (IoT), while adding an additional security layer within the wireless network.

Campbelltown City Council is also planning the review of their existing IPTel platform, which is managed by Outcomex. The objectives of this review are to simplify, modernise and increase collaboration capabilities for the organisation.