Customer Profile

Salford City Council Local authority meets GCSX CoCo compliance challenge with RSA enVision®

The City of is a local government district of Greater , , with the status of a Acceleration city and metropolitan . It has a population of 218,000. exists to serve the “By centralising management and storage of all log residents of Salford and delivers a vast range of public files for up to six months, the RSA enVision platform services funded both from residents’ council tax and has accelerated us to full GCSX CoCo compliance from government grants. status in a matter of days. But that’s not all. It’s also provided us with greater understanding of our network performance, helping us to reduce the time business challEnge it takes to troubleshoot – in some instances from a Salford City Council is seen as an innovator within local couple of hours to just five minutes.” government, particularly with regard to technology. Joe Whiteley, ICT Infrastructure Specialist, For example, it was one of the Salford City Council first councils to adopt employee authentication services (EAS) – a scalable, sustainable and secure solution that avoids the need for employees to go through multiple Business Challenge authentication processes every • Enable employees to access the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSX), giving them time they need to access sensitive ance direct, secure communication with other information from different sources.

g l government bodies More recently, Salford City Council a • Meet GCSX Code of Connection (CoCo) has been working towards being at compliance requirements by recording all one of the first local authorities to instances of employees accessing the GCSX sign up to the Government Connect Solution Secure Extranet (GCSX) – a secure, • Deployed RSA enVision security information private Wide Area Network (WAN) and event management (SIEM) solution to that enables secure interactions automatically collect and analyse log data from between local authorities and any device on the network central government departments and national bodies. • Easy to deploy and scale, storing complete log records without filtration or normalisation However, before Salford City Council’s GCSX circuit could be activated, it needed to comply with the GCSX Results Code of Connection (CoCo) – a list of security controls • Achieved full sign-off for GCSX CoCo that apply to all local authorities taking either a direct compliance connection to the GCSX, or who are connecting via an • Greater visibility into network performance enables it to streamline operations and aggregated gateway. improve overall security “One of these security controls is to have in place an effective SIEM that records instances of employees using the GCSX to access central government data, as well as further detail about the data being accessed and the ways in which it is used,” explains Joe Whiteley, ICT Infrastructure Specialist, Salford City Council. Solution Results Salford City Council already had in place a competitor Thanks to RSA enVision, Salford City Council now SIEM solution. However, since it could not cope with has full sign-off GCSX CoCo compliance, meaning its the number of logs being generated it was unstable employees will benefit from secure, direct interaction and prone to falling over. Since CoCo requires all with other local authorities, central government access attempts to the GCSX be recorded, this was departments and national bodies. unacceptable from a compliance perspective. In addition, RSA enVision also provides Salford City “We wanted a reliable and scalable SIEM solution that Council with a better understanding of its network would help us not only collect logs of GCSX access, performance, user behavior and infrastructure. This but also logs from all parts of our network including greater visibility enables it to streamline operations firewalls, VPN connections, Microsoft Windows Server and improve overall security. For example, the time Active Directory, Webmail servers and servers hosting taken to address network and IT problems has been our virtual machine infrastructure,” says Whitelely. reduced considerably - in some cases, from a couple of To meet these requirements, Salford City Council hours to just five minutes. selected the RSA enVision platform from RSA, the “To solve issues, such as wireless connectivity or Security Division of EMC. RSA enVision offers an system log-on, we previously had to separately analyse effective SIEM and log management solution, capable four or five different device logs to work out what was of collecting and analysing large amounts of data in causing the problem,” explains Whiteley. “RSA enVision real-time, from any event source and in computing offers one management interface that simultaneously environments of any size. RSA enVision is easily displays logs from multiple devices, meaning we can scalable - eliminating the need for filtering and to identify troublespots almost instantly.” deploy agents. “We have worked with EMC for a number of years,” says Whitelely. “We know firsthand that its products and pre- and post-sales support is second to none, so by choosing a solution from RSA we knew there would be no issues. Installation and configuration was simple, and we were up and running in just one day.”

“RSA enVision fits perfectly with our needs. On the one hand, enabling us to meet GCSX CoCo compliance; and on the other hand helping us to streamline our IT operations. We’re impressed with what it does and the speed at which it does it.” Joe Whiteley, ICT Infrastructure Specialist, Salford City Council

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