Richmondshire District Council

Richmondshire District Council is located in the heart of North Yorkshire and covers a large area of the North Yorkshire Dales including Swaledale, Arkengarthdale, Wensleydale, Coverdale, as well as Scot’s Dyke and Scotch Corner.

With over 250 users across 5 community office locations, Richmondshire District Council had plans to move and centralise their offices.

Key Outcomes:
  • Migration completed three days ahead of schedule
  • Complex IT infrastructure move with minimal downtime
  • Dedicated Project Management and Technical Leader

"The management and staff at Richmondshire were amazed how quickly services were back up and running after such a complex move. I would like to pass on my sincere thanks and appreciation to razorblue for their support."

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The Challenge:

Richmondshire District Council were embarking on a project to centralise their offices, closing five ageing offices and replacing them with one state-of-the-art location housed in former school buildings. The move was to take place over a weekend to minimise downtime and the network had to be available for users and members of the public on the Monday morning.

Due to the rapid change in technology over the past few years, the council’s network was very complex, including several virtual servers, a SAN, switches, firewalls, and lots of external connectivity. Although the council have their own IT team, they had little experience in carrying out complex IT infrastructure moves.

A professional partner was required to help deliver the office move in a short turnaround time.

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The Solution:

Having completed work for the council in the past, razorblue had a strong understanding of the council’s IT infrastructure and the challenges they faced. razorblue assigned a Project Manager and a Technical Leader to the project, and a robust plan was created.

The council had ordered several new fibre connections to PSN (the Central Government Network), their wide area network, other councils, and the internet – all of which were being delivered by third parties – and deadlines were tight. As protocol (in the event that a connection was not delivered on time), a temporary data backup solution and wireless link to the new building were installed to allow co-existence.

razorblue’s team migrated the server infrastructure on a Friday and it was fully-operational by the end of the day – three days ahead of schedule.

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