North Lanarkshire Council joins Scottish Wide Area Network

North Lanarkshire Council has joined the Scottish Wide Area Network (SWAN).

The council is the latest local authority to sign up to the single public services network for the public sector organisations within Scotland.

It joins over 50 other organisations, which are sharing infrastructure and services, with the aim of lowering costs and improving connectivity across the public sector in Scotland.

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North Lanarkshire Council has more than 150 educational and 200 corporate buildings, delivering services to 340,000 residents including 49,000 pupils. 

The SWAN service being delivered involves around 250 circuits with bandwidths up to 1Gb per second.

Brian Cook, Head of Revenue and e-Government Solutions at North Lanarkshire Council, said: “We have high hopes that SWAN will lead to a greater level of collaboration and sharing across the public sector and that North Lanarkshire will benefit from that both functionally and financially”.

SWAN is being delivered through a framework contract with Capita IT Enterprise Services.

Capita reports that since the contract was signed in February 2014 over 3,750 sites and nearly 4,000 circuits have been connected and a core network and operations centre has been constructed.

The team has also received Public Service Network accreditation and ISO27001 certification for information security.

Eddie Cronie, Managing Director of SWAN, said: “The addition of NLC to the Scottish Wide Area Network shows that SWAN has become a crucial part of Scotland’s national IT infrastructure.

“For NLC, the benefits of SWAN’s economies of scale means that staff will have access to faster, better networking at a reduced cost.”