Well organized, Secure wifi for > 3,000 civil servants

“How do we ensure that our employees and visitors can easily use Wi-Fi? It’s a question that comes up in many municipalities. Also in West Brabant, where Equalit supports various municipalities with digital solutions. We speak to Richard Bastiaansen who is responsible at Equalit for network management, and Wifi in particular.

What does Equalit do for customers?

‘The core business of our team within Equalit is data security for the residents of our participating municipalities. We work for eleven municipalities and one employment agency. This includes municipal services, such as waste recycling centers, sports parks, libraries and so on. In total, we manage over 3,000 workstations.

Until recently, each municipality had its own Wi-Fi solution for which we did the management and maintenance. We provided customized services for each participant,” Richard says. ‘That is not ideal managerially or technically and also makes it more difficult to ensure safety.’

What makes it so complex to ensure digital security?

Richard gives an example, “Those who worked at Municipality A and left employment still knew the password to log in. It is not intended that former employees can connect to the Wi-Fi network when they are off duty.

So we had several reasons to look for another solution: security had to go up, and we ourselves wanted more uniformity and simplicity in management. So the security officers at most municipalities immediately supported our plan to switch to govroam and publicroam.

How did you arrive at govroam and publicroam?

‘We were already familiar with govroam and several municipalities were already working with it. Moreover, our research showed that the security of these apps is really good, the ease of use is great and the management would be less compared to the old solution. Although we had also been asked to see if we could build our own solution, this sum of benefits was so obvious that we didn’t go for it.

What are the reactions of users?

‘Well, do you have a minute?” laughs Richard. ‘Just kidding. We hear bitterly little … but in our business that’s only right! We rarely get compliments. In fact, we only get called when something goes wrong.

I do know firsthand that the implementation went smoothly. We first ran a Proof Of Concept (POC) within Equalit as a test. We fixed the teething problems that surfaced then, and we refined some things. We then began rolling out to our participants

The rollout consisted of only a few steps:

• Someone from Equalit went to the locations to turn off the old Wifi networks and stayed for part of the day to answer any questions.
• Equalit went to locations to explain;
• Then Equalit turned on the new Wi-Fi networks and left the old Wi-Fi networks running for another two or three weeks;

In addition to govroam and publicroam, you also offer Equalitroam. Why?

‘In fact, Equalitroam is a Wi-Fi network, just like govroam and publicroam. We devised this variation especially for our participating municipalities. All devices issued to employees from the municipalities are connected to Equalitroam and are fully managed by us. Are you newly employed? Then you get a device that connects to Wifi completely automatically.

All in all, thanks to these developments, we have advanced on several fronts:

The three networks offer a high degree of security. This is very important for our participants who are role models in secure data management; The management burden has been reduced a lot, giving us more time for other IT projects.

Oh yes, then I forget about national coverage. That’s nice for our participating municipalities – who can use govroam or publicroam at participating locations throughout the Netherlands – but I also find myself finding it convenient. Once I visit a neighboring municipality for a seminar, for example, I’m always delighted when they offer publicroam and govroam!