How Greater London Authority's IT will face Olympic challenge

One of the biggest challenges for the Greater London Authority during the Olympic Games will be ensuring its IT infrastructure is able to support all its staff - a large number of which will be working at home, or from other remote locations. With more than 900 employees, the authority has been preparing its IT infrastructure to cope if half its workforce needed to work from home, or remotely. David Munn, head of IT at the GLA, is confident that the authority will be able to deal with the extra pressure. "If we're put in that position, we can cope with that," he says. Based at City Hall near London Bridge - an Olympics travel hotspot - the GLA recognises that it needs to have resilient technology in place if its employees can't make it into the office. As well as this, it also has the added difficulty that a large number of volunteers will be using the authority's network during the Olympics. "It's quite complicated because we've got an awful lot of people doing volunteering work over the Olympic period, so we've got about a third of the organisation that aren't going to be doing their day jobs during that time anyway," he says. "They're going to be running all over the place potentially assisting some of the city operations work happening, or they'll be working out of the media centre; they could be anywhere in London. We want to make sure that they can get access to our stuff." Improving efficiency Part of the preparation process has included upgrading the GLA's remote working solution and making sure the wireless network is able to deal with all the dignitaries that will be visiting City Hall. Munn believes that the organisation is in a strong position to cope during what he envisages will be a pressurised environment. In 2007 the authority started a virtualisation programme, and about 80% of its infrastructure is now virtualised. This process has included the removal of three quarters of the authority's servers. According to Munn, this has allowed the GLA to expand its infrastructure without increasing its costs. To improve efficiency it has also implemented a business continuity replication solution from US-firm Falconstor. The company's network storage server virtualises the GLA's storage environment, copying it across a shared metropolitan area network (MAN) to Transport for London's data centre in Woking, which the GLA shares. Munn says that the authority can use Falconstor's RecoverTrac application to restore its entire IT environment in a matter of hours, rather than days - as was the case previously - if something were to happen. He says that this has reduced the costs of providing a tape backup solution and has also automated the process of producing regular snapshots, which can be used to restore lost data. "I wanted to be in the position where, particularly with the disaster recovery side, you could almost flick a switch and bring the services back. One of the things that will be very precious during the [Olympics] is time. Any down time just won't be acceptable for people," says Munn. "We could have mayors from all around the world in City Hall as well. It would be terribly embarrassing if the service was poor and if they were to say, 'It's much better where I come from.' We really can't have that." Initiatives such as WorkWise UK have firmly put the spotlight on smarter ways of working. For the GLA, the Olympics presents a good opportunity to fully test its capacity to support staff working away from the office. Most people that work from home are agnostic about whether they use their own technology or the GLA's, and there is currently a mixture of both ways of working, says Munn. As long as people have a browser, they can access the authority's systems through a virtual private network. Shared services Along with TfL, the GLA works with a number of other authorities in the capital including the London Fire Brigade, the Metropolitan police, and London borough councils. The authority hopes that by working together and sharing best practice, it will get the best out of its technology and information. "A lot of our information on our London Datastore is transport stuff, so we've been working really closely with TfL and other agencies and boroughs at looking at how we can present London-wide information in a reasonably coherent and understandable way," according to Munn. When asked whether plans to upgrade and introduce new technology come from the top of the organisation or are driven by the IT staff themselves, he says that it tends to be "a bit of both". A lot of the business pressures from the top are around cost reduction and a desire for more collaboration, while the IT staff tend to drive what technology will be used and how it is delivered, he explains. Munn says it's not quite Boris Johnson beating the IT team over the head with a stick. "No, not quite, and that's really not his style anyway. It genuinely tends to be a conversational type approach." Big decisions The big decisions over the next couple of years for the GLA will be how it delivers its services. This includes exploring whether certain services will still be delivered in-house or whether some will be put in the cloud and hosted by someone else. "Much of where we go next will depend on what we're going to be doing with our colleagues across the GLA group. Clearly, what would look a bit odd is for us to do something which would stop us being able to collaborate effectively with our colleagues in the rest of the GLA family," says Munn. "We'll also look at where we are as a group in our data storage strategy and whether that continues to be using big data centres or whether that involves externalisation or the cloud." He adds: "But that's further off, that's not one for this year." This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.