CASE STUDY: Teneo & Devon and Cornwall Police

Infrastructure optimisation specialist Teneo worked with Devon and Cornwall constabulary to help it overcome the issues of poor network performance at its remote and short tenure locations.
Employees working at police stations in rural areas where fast fibre connections are not available, or in smaller short tenure locations such as shared council premises, experienced poor network performance which resulted in slow access to critical police software applications.

The constabulary operates from more than 200 locations and covers the largest geographical area in England extending 180 miles from the Dorset and Somerset borders in the east to the Isles of Scilly in the west. It has high speed fibre network links to its main locations, but often has to arrange with telecoms providers to lay new fibre connections for rural sites where high speed fibre links are not available.  New links have to be physically laid in the ground at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds and a lead time of up to 90 days.  For most of the 70 smaller police stations this cost cannot be justified.

Devon and Cornwall Constabulary began investigating WAN optimisation technology to help ease data flows for these seventy sites which rely on special secure ADSL links offering a minimum of 1Mbs bandwidth. The constabulary consulted Teneo which conducted a trial, installing Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its Exeter police headquarters and at a police station in Torquay. The appliances achieved data reductions of 70 percent across a range of police management and Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Sharepoint, which convinced the constabulary to roll out Riverbed Steelhead appliances to a total of 26 locations.