[Leading Cork to take its place as a World Class City] __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ICT Services ICT Response to Covid-19
2021 continued to see unprecedented challenges arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in an accelerated delivery of several key ICT change projects. There was an ongoing focus on facilitating remote and home working in response to Covid-19. At the same time the ICT Department looked at every opportunity to maintain and enhance the digital and on-line services provided to the internal business organisation as well as the businesses and citizens of the city. ICT Department engaged with business departments to look at new and innovative ways of supporting service delivery across all domains of the organisation. The restrictions around access to public offices meant that new methods were required to continue the business of the Council. The team worked with a number of different sections and services so that there are now over 130 forms available through the website, processing over 100,000 applications and payments. This is done using a flexible cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and new payment channel. These forms and applications range from parking permits to community grants and street furniture applications. Engaging with the public was a significant factor in the development of several the forms, for example, the grant application forms for outdoor seating and accessories for tourism and hospitality businesses and parking permit applications which allowed the traffic counter to reduce its hours during the pandemic and still be able to process applications and payments online. In some cases, this also necessitated working with the business teams to undertake significant changes to the business processes, governance, and reconciliation requirements.
The Council’s suite of websites played a key role in ensuring that community initiatives and public events could continue in some, albeit limited, form during the year.
ICT Programme of Work The ICT Department consists of several teams each of which contributed to the considerable progress made in 2021 across all business areas.
Operations Team Remote working continued to be a significant priority for the Operations team:
• Provision of a corporate laptop and VPN access: The user is provided with a City Council domain- joined laptop and uses a VPN application to provide direct remote access to the City Council network. • Virtual Desktop (VDI): The virtual environment has a secure site-to-site VPN tunnel established with Cork City Council network to provide access to internal resources. Users can access this virtual desktop from a personal device at home. • The replacement programme of PCs with laptops for approx. 90% of office-based staff has been successfully rolled out as a direct outcome of the Covid-19 response in 2020 and 2021. This means the demand for VDI is reduced as staff can remotely log on to the CCC network via VPN on their laptops. The rollout of VDI was highly successful as an interim solution while the organisation switched to mobile computing.
Comms Upgrade: Our Ballincollig site was upgraded with single high bandwidth fibre connection replacing two copper DSL connections. No updates to the SIRO rollout to date.
Firewall Upgrade : Completed a refresh of our core firewalls ensuring continued protection from cyber-attacks on our network perimeter.
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