Network & Infrastructure Services Archives - Page 6 of 6

Impact Mentoring – improving outcomes for vulnerable young people and families

Posted on: 1 April 2021

One thing that has come under the spotlight in the UK during the Covid pandemic has been ensuring fair access to education for all children. The school environment is often a hugely positive one for many children, offering structure as well as education and, in some cases, meals.

Impact Mentoring was founded by Wayne Cockram to mentor and support children who were struggling with their education and circumstances, inside and outside of schools. “By providing one-to-one mentoring, which so many children need, it develops a trusting, supportive relationship and helps to raise aspirations. Once a young person knows what they want to be, they better understand the importance of education and see school as an important part of their journey, ultimately improving their outcomes,” he explains.

“School is such an important welfare support system for kids. Impact Mentoring is largely funded by the schools, to help us go in and work their students, but when the school holidays come around, that funding stops. To address this gap, we set up the charitable arm of Impact Mentoring, Ignite Life, enabling us to further help kids who simply become isolated during the holidays. We realised that we needed to stop this from happening as a lot of good work was being undone during the school holidays.”

The charity has covered some impressive ground, delivering tangible benefits to young people who needed them most. “We realised that three hours of mentoring wasn’t enough for some of these kids, they needed specialist support,” explains Wayne. “Trauma in early life is a key factor in why some children find learning almost impossible. Specialist therapeutic help such as counselling can repair these issues, but often the wait can be 18 months or more. Going private isn’t an option to most families either, as the costs can be out of reach.”

Ignite Life has provided counselling sessions for young people that are free to schools, parents and the local authority, with an eight-day turnaround from referral, giving these young people the help they need, when they need it.

With the onset of Covid and the subsequent lockdowns and closures of schools, Wayne and his team identified another area of need. “The food vouchers are a great idea in theory, if you can get to the supermarket, do your shopping and get it all home,” he says. “My colleague Tom Gould decided that he would reach out to the some of families around us to see if they needed help with getting food. A lot of families have, for example, children with disabilities, and it makes getting to the shops, doing your shopping and then getting home incredibly difficult under normal circumstances.

“So, Tom started helping out with a few families. We thought, initially, that we might have 20-25 families to support in this way, but we now have over 150. We’re helping to feed over 500 people in our community each week.”

Another challenge posed to these families, and particularly the children, is accessing education during Covid. Many do not have access to the internet, so continuing their education away from the school environment is nigh on impossible.

“We’ve set up an environment here at Impact Mentoring where these kids can come and use our laptops and access the internet,” explains Wayne. “We always have a team of our mentors onsite to help them. This is helpful in many ways; it enables them to continue their educational journey, it gets them out of the house and into a safe space and we can offer them help with their homework and school tasks. Many come from families where such access and support are impossible. We’ve set up a really vibrant, aspirational environment for them here, somewhere where they actively want to come and spend time.”

Impact Mentoring also assists some of the children by giving them laptops that they can take home with them. “This enables us to deliver mobile sessions to some of the children, particularly those who can’t come to our site to use them,” adds Wayne. “This helps to increase the capacity of our services and help more children.”

You can find our more about Impact Mentoring and the important work it does here. And learn more about Ignite Life here. CACI is proud to be supporting Impact Mentoring by donating laptops to the centre.

How tactical network automation can help banks respond to a changing financial sector

Posted on: 15 February 2021

The financial services sector has undergone seismic change – even well-established institutions are feeling the pressure from leaner margins and agile new competitors. In response, they’re hungry for new ways to drive efficiency, create revenue streams, and offer enhanced value to customers.

That dual demand – to unlock innovation and agility while cutting process costs – lands squarely at the door of IT.

A smarter, leaner finance sector needs responsive, cost-effective IT

At CACI, our specialists are used to helping financial institutions to optimise their network infrastructure. And we see every day how smart, tactical use of network automation can play a role in meeting the challenge by reducing workloads, improving quality, and meeting regulatory standards.

Automated switch checks improve visibility and accelerate ACI migration

It’s perhaps easiest to see the impact of tactical network automation in an accelerating and de-risking a major project, like network migration.

Next-generation data centre infrastructure is a key foundation for modern, data-driven banking. But achieving that transformation can often encounter unexpected and time-consuming obstacles.

For example, switching from a legacy system Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure can mean executing thousands of commands across hundreds of devices to define the migration requirements of each VLAN.

Instead of doing this manually, we built a script in Python 3, combining community-built packages to connect to each switch, translate the device output, and arrange the data into an easily manageable database.

It quickly extracted the information needed for migration planning and execution – preventing significant project delays, while eliminating the risk of human error.

MAC address checks de-risk migration in advance

Likewise, with ACI each IP address can correspond to one MAC address only. Any switches in the legacy infrastructure that exceed this limit could have a catastrophic effect. Finding them in advance of a migration is crucial – but extremely time-consuming. And missing one is a significant risk.

So on-site professionals from CACI built a solution to attach to each switch and create a report detailing which boxes have two MAC addresses or more.

Again, the automation saves potentially hundreds of engineer hours, and gives confidence that the migration can proceed without the risk of human error.

Self-service port provisioning saves hours and improves service

BAU processes can also benefit from automation – and here, the impact builds cumulatively over time.

For example, server deployment teams rely on fast, accurate port provisioning. As well as the initial configuration, each request requires extensive testing, and when completed manually the work can total dozens of engineer hours per week.

So we developed a proof of concept for a self-service system, where requests are made through a front-end web portal, but the provision and testing are automated.

As well as releasing engineer time and reducing risk, the solution prevents internal clients waiting for their request, accelerating their own work in turn. It also eliminates variations in naming and other standards, and documents each process for compliance purposes.

Bulk element configuration proves compliance without headcount

That compliance element demonstrates why automation is such a good fit for a regulated industry like finance. Because it can do more than just save time and headcount; it can provide documentation.

Each script in an institution’s library serves to document network requirements to be followed by engineers in future, and prove compliance with the relevant network engineering, security, and data sovereignty standards. And because the program is created to fit the bank’s own policies, conformity is built in.

Meanwhile, by eliminating manual configuration errors that could bring down key production environments, automation helps to avoid serious service outages that could result in sanctions from the financial conduct authority.

Quick, tactical wins with a long-term business impact

In these and dozens of other ways, we’ve deployed network automation to solve tactical issues, save financial institutions time and money, and facilitate faster, smarter working.

But the long-term cumulative effect is even more significant. The client always owns the IP in each script we’ve written and the program performs its task repeatably. That means the automation will go on saving time in future – so every solution we create makes the organisation that much more efficient and effective – ready to compete in tomorrow’s financial market.

If you’d like to discuss how we can use network automation to ease your migration, streamline your processes, or make you more efficient, please contact our Network Services experts today.

IT Delivery Assurance – Is it needed now more than ever?

Posted on: 10 July 2020

With the economy now re-opening as lockdown measures are eased, there’s an acute awareness of a new normal – a heightened focus on what matters and a keener appetite to quickly disregard the things that don’t.

Increased remote working is likely here to stay so robust cyber security controls become even more important. Now, more than ever, businesses are keen to find out whether the platform they’re standing on was built from tinder wood.

To accelerate Britain’s digital maturation, the government has announced £10M funding to develop groundbreaking cyber security technologies. However, owning the tools is only a part of the solution – businesses are often in possession of good tooling but lack the skills to properly integrate, run and support these technologies. The same could be true of any kind of IT project and the failure rate of IT projects remains appalling.

The most common response to a history of failed projects is to increase project oversight, with a particular emphasis on reporting. However, more is often mistaken for better when it comes to governance.

In a Gartner study of failed IT projects, analysis revealed most complex projects had unrealistic goals, unproven teams and almost no accountability at all levels of the management and governance structure, meaning no one is responsible for failure.

What’s more, project failures led to low morale, often coupled with high attrition rates. In highly technical environments, the impact of this staff churn can dramatically affect project milestones.

This is why you should consider delivery assurance for your next major project.

To help ease this burden, we offer delivery assurance with all our technical services to ensure that the required outcomes are achieved.

We offer to take responsibility for the quality and timeliness of our consultants’ deliverables by:

· Recruiting a high standard of consultant

· Providing management supervision of consultants’ work

· Ensuring resource continuity and upscaling via a pool of consultants

· Overseeing quality of deliverables

· Checking customer satisfaction of our consultants’ work

This offers a range of key benefits for our clients:

· They can be confident that a programme will be delivered on time, to budget and with business benefits optimally realised.

· They have an independent advisor to mediate and resolve any disputes you may have with a 3rd party supplier

· Resourcing and delivery issues are taken away

· Reduced stress about anything going wrong because they know they are covered and it will be resolved at no further cost

CACI Network Services has successfully delivered for our clients at the largest enterprise scale. Speak to us to see if you’d like to know more about our delivery assurance offering and whether we could be a good fit for your organisation.

The benefits of fully managed hosting for youth offending teams

Posted on: 27 March 2020

Storing, maintaining and securing data can be expensive and inflexible if you choose to host it onsite. This is why we’re seeing a number of youth offending teams moving away from onsite hosting and opting for outsourced fully managed hosting off premise. Besides efficiencies of cost and effort, outsourcing is enabling teams to be fully compliant and secure.

Moving your data to the cloud brings about numerous benefits for youth offending services. From a commercial standpoint, it means that youth offending teams can switch the expense of hosting from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure, freeing up vital funds for improving outcomes for young people in your care.

From a security standpoint, it makes managing data a lot easier, too. By leveraging the spend of larger hosting specialists, you are in a stronger position to secure your data. For example, Microsoft spends in excess of $1bn every year on security, which most firms leverage through use of Microsoft applications. That sort of budget simply isn’t available to youth offending teams, so it makes sense to leverage the spend of larger operators.

Security patching is another element of hosting that a fully managed solution can relieve you of. The threat of your data being breached is an evolving one which requires near constant updates to your framework. Again, by leveraging the spend of a specialist solution your security is constantly being updated. At CACI, we run regular stress and penetration tests internally and via external agencies to keep us one step ahead of the game, keeping ours and our clients’ data secure. This is one of the reasons that we are trusted to deliver to highly secure government and local government hosting solutions, many of which use our G-Cloud 10 hosting solution which is available to youth services.

This provides peace of mind that your data is safe. It also provides you with flexible access to it. If, for example, a disaster scenario occurs and your onsite solution gets damaged, how will you recover the data? A fully managed hosting solution will have you back up and running in no time. It’s also useful, during times such as a global pandemic when staff are likely to be based away from the office, for there to be a single access point which enables your service to keep running by maintaining the provision of requisite data to your team.

Such flexibility also extends through your operations. Where you need to integrate your data with third party applications, you can simply plug it in and go. For example, if you’re looking to utilise or expand your use of mobile portals or apps, you can run your data through these easily. This will help to support future initiatives of joined-up, multi-agency approaches to youth justice. All this means that you can continue to adapt and evolve your services, empowering you to provide the best possible service and outcomes on the front line.

If you’re considering moving to a fully managed hosting solution, or you would like more information on CACI’s fully managed hosting solution for youth offending teams, visit our ChildView page.

School admissions made easy

Posted on: 28 November 2019

Administering school admissions is one of those tasks that sounds straightforward from the outside. Parents lodge applications for their children to attend a school, plus second and third choices, the applications get reviewed against the admission criteria and spaces are assigned accordingly. Easy.

Since most people view this process from the outside, it is important that schools have transparent admissions criteria and that these are adhered to in a transparent and fair way. At a base level, schools aim to achieve 100% admissions. This needs to be achieved whilst affording parents options for their children and making clear why decisions regarding allocations have been made.

Meeting the needs of children

When you then add in the complex needs of children, from children with special educational needs and disabilities, those qualifying for the pupil premium and those who are in care, to more prosaic attributes such as proximity to the school, the attendance of a sibling or those who attended a feeder school, there are myriad complications which make school admissions anything but the straightforward exercise they can appear as from the outside.

So, how can local education authorities and schools bring simplicity to what is, at times, a highly complex and challenging task?

The role of technology

Technology has been making the process of school admissions far more straightforward. By integrating with third-party mapping apps, for example, it is far quicker to determine whether or not an applicant resides within the school’s catchment area, automatically saving a lot of time in manually checking each application for such criteria.

By using an online admissions process, schools and authorities can ensure that parents are aware of the admissions criteria and can make the process a lot simpler for them, too. By logging into a parent portal, parents can complete admissions forms online and track the status at their convenience, making the whole process more engaging, more convenient and paperless – no more filling out forms and visiting the Post Office to submit applications.

Furthermore, adhering to the Department of Education rules for which parents can apply by can be formatted into a technology solution. Then aspects such as the ordering hierarchy by which children are granted admissions can be implemented to deliver further efficiency through the process. To speed up the process further, parents can upload elements such as proof of address earlier in the process, ensuring that there is transparency throughout for both parents and administrators.

Having the data securely stored in electronic formatting reduces the need for re-keying data again further down the process and enables schools to automate vast swathes of the admissions process. Just being able to automatically detect whether or not an applicant resides within the school’s catchment area saves a lot of time in having to manually check this. This is also transparent and can be easily evidenced in the case of a dispute against an admission.

Automation

Furthermore, pupils can be linked to others, making it easier to see if their sibling(s) attend the same school that is being applied for. Other categorisations can be made when in comes to the applications of special educational needs and disabilities pupils, as well as those who qualify for the pupil premium. This offers schools a far clearer picture of who is being admitted and who is not, meaning that adjustments can be made where necessary to ensure that the relevant targets are achieved. If they are not achieved, it can be evidenced exactly why not.

Utilising technology and establishing rules within a system also reduces the risk associated with human error. Putting a workflow in place around the admissions process ensures that all steps are adhered to and all information regarding an application can be automatically produced. Rather than having to manually trawl through records, they can be found instantly. This not only expediates the process but makes it far more accurate as well.

Technology is making the schools admission process easier, faster, more accurate, more transparent and fairer.

For more information on how technology could improve your admissions process, contact us today.