North Lanarkshire Council joins Scottish Wide Area Network

A single public services network for use by all public service organisations in Scotland, is now being accessed by North Lanarkshire Council.

Since the contract was signed in February 2014, over 3,750 sites and nearly 4,000 circuits have been connected and a core network and operations centre has been constructed. The network has Public Service Network accreditation and it complies to the sought after ISO27001 security standard.

North Lanarkshire Council comprises in excess of 150 educational and 200 corporate establishments, delivering services to 340,000 residents, including 49,000 pupils. The SWAN service being delivered comprises some 250 circuits utilising bandwidths up to 1Gbps.

North Lanarkshire Council joins over 50 other organisations that are benefiting from infrastructure and service sharing, which is lowering costs and improving connectivity across the whole public sector in Scotland.

Brian Cook, head of revenue and e-government solutions at North Lanarkshire Council, said: “We have high hopes that SWAN will lead to a greater level of collaboration and sharing across the public sector and that North Lanarkshire will benefit from that both functionally and financially.”

Eddie Cronie, managing director of SWAN, said: “The addition of NLC to the Scottish Wide Area Network shows that SWAN has become a crucial part of Scotland’s national IT infrastructure. For NLC, the benefits of SWAN’s economies of scale means that staff will have access to faster, better networking at a reduced cost.”

@AntonySavvas