About North Herts Council
The district of North Hertfordshire includes the towns of Hitchin, Letchworth, Baldock and Royston and their surrounding villages. North Herts Council support their communities with a number of services including waste & recycling, environmental health, housing advice, and parks & greenspaces. They are also responsible for three leisure centres, two outdoor lidos, Hitchin Town Hall, and North Herts Museum.
The Challenge
North Herts Council’s operations depend on connections that are fast, robust, and easy to manage, both for council staff and the general public. But with legacy systems nearing their end of life, the decision was made to evaluate potential alternatives, and seize the opportunity to optimise the entire Wi-Fi estate.
Having already established a strong working with Xpertex over the course of nearly twenty years, mostly involving networking services and a number of ad-hoc projects, the council’s IT team engaged with them follow a procurement process to provide a leading-edge solution that was suitable for their requirements. Following a period of close consultation and careful consideration of the proposed options, Juniper Mist was selected as the new foundation of their connectivity, allowing all WiFi access points to be managed by an AI-powered Cloud service.
The Solution
“The key thing with Mist is that since we’ve installed it, we’ve never had to touch it. It just works.”
Mark Robinson, ICT Technical Operations Manager, North Herts Council
The council’s IT team worked with their Xpertex counterparts to ensure every aspect of the Juniper Mist Cloud was configured to their specific requirements, ensuring they could begin making use of its capabilities straight away. This included a survey of multiple sites (including council premises, North Herts Museum, and Hitchin Town Hall), to identify any areas where additional hardware would be required, and hands-on support with the deployment of arrays to ensure the proposed timeline would be adhered to.
Juniper Mist provides the council’s IT team with the tools they need to manage the entire Wi-Fi network through a single, highly intuitive portal, with different connectivity options for council staff and the general public across all sites, with security policies applied as appropriate. The ability to deep dive on device connectivity issues has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention from multiple sources involving the IT team, allowing for time and resources to be reinvested in other aspects of the council’s digital infrastructure.
While the highly intuitive control panel allows complete autonomy when it comes to managing the council’s network, their Xpertex account team remain readily available to provide technical support or consultancy when necessary, allowing the IT team to complement their own expertise with Xpertex’s capabilities as an Elite Plus Partner in the Juniper Networks Partner Advantage Program.
As a Cloud-based system, all updates and new functionalities for Juniper Mist are applied automatically, as soon as they become available, which has ensured the network remains fully compliant with all Government regulations around cyber security, and that the very latest threat intelligence is acted on as soon as it becomes available.
In this way, Juniper Mist has established itself as an invisible technology within North Herts Council’s networking operations. North Herts Council’s IT team continue to explore Juniper Mist’s evolving range of capabilities, particularly around analytics and troubleshooting, utilising its AI-powered functionality to maintain the highest standard of connectivity across all its sites, while achieving tangible time and cost savings that drive improvements in other areas.
Solution Benefits
- A significant reduction in the time and resources spent on Wi-Fi management through AI-based automation.
- Optimal performance and availability of Wi-Fi at all council sites
- Full control and visibility of the entire network through a single pane of glass
- All patches, updates, and new functionalities automatically applied.
- Ability to deep dive and highlight any device connectivity issues.
- Specialist technical support from a dedicated account team, as required.
A full-scale Juniper Mist deployment provides North Herts Council with world-class, AI-powered networking
With Xpertex serving as their key technology partner, North Herts Council utilised the leading-edge Juniper Mist platform to streamline and optimise their entire network, achieving significant savings in terms of time and resources.
