Voted as one of the safest cities in New York for 2019 (SafeWise), the Town of Kent is a thriving community in Putnam County, NY, with more than 13,200 residents. The town consists of 11 communities and hamlets surrounded by many lakes, including Lake Carmel, Wonder Lake and Fahnestock State Park. Being less than an hour’s drive from New York City, it is a popular destination for families to enjoy camping, boating, fishing and hiking as well as local town attractions.
With aging phone systems and network infrastructures operating in separate IT environments, however, the town board recognized they needed to better serve their citizens using city services by updating their communication capabilities across all locations.
Updating Systems Across Multiple Departments & Locations
“Our challenge was replacing an outdated phone system across three Town of Kent entities, while combining local area networks between the town government and police department,” said Richard Harris, IT Consultant. “We also needed to add automatic data backup, storage, and disaster recovery capabilities to our entire campus.”
The Town of Kent was seeking to modernize and unify their communication systems across campus to interconnect the police department, town hall, and public library, with future potential to connect other town department locations off campus onto the same network. The Town of Kent chose RingSquared for its expertise to not only simplify and modernize their campus communications network but also fully manage all aspects of the transition.
Creating a Secure, Flexible System
RingSquared began by consolidating all three campus building communication systems into a single UCaaS voice solution run through RingSquared’s secure cloud network. It was vitally important to complete all cutovers without disrupting town emergency operations during transition.
This included:
- UCaaS with call recording for police department
- Next-generation firewall
- Intrusion prevention system
- Built-in backup and recovery
- Multiple WAN transport for redundancy
- SD-WAN traffic orchestration
- 4G wireless backup
A New and Reliable Cloud-Based Solution
The Town of Kent now has a reliable, cloud-based IT environment with state-of-the-art unified communication capabilities from a single provider. As they look to the future, they have the digital infrastructure in place to move additional off-campus city buildings to a centrally managed environment without needing to incur high upfront costs or manage multiple vendors. The cost savings using a predictable monthly subscription fee model allow for future growth and speed to operation.
- Simplified communications with unified campus communications
- Increased network reliability and performance
- Improved visibility into their network for proactive monitoring and upkeep
- Enabled ‘always-on’ connectivity with three layers of WAN and hardware redundancy
- Improved voice quality between campus buildings
- Eliminated session drops and downtime
- Reduced risk of exposure to cyber threats
- Safeguarded data with built-in backup and recovery
“We had high expectations when we initially met with RingSquared, and we are happy to say that they have delivered. They are staffed by responsive industry professionals who continue to prove we made a sound decision to go with RingSquared,” says Harris.
Unifying Campus Communications
RingSquared moved all three campus building communication systems into a single Unified Communications solution by moving employee seats to RingSquared’s voice network environment. Now with the Town of Kent’s communications system operating in a cloud environment, central visibility into their network allows proactive monitoring and alerting.
The RingSquared team of certified engineers uses a broad set of tools to measure the health and performance of the Town of Kent’s network in real-time, day or night, to enable quick troubleshooting, policy changes, or load balancing as needed.
Improving Voice Availability
To ensure an ‘always on’ call environment, RingSquared installed multiple WAN transports consisting of coax, fiber, and broadband along with SD-WAN functionality in the cloud environment to manage call connections between campus locations. Town of Kent employees now never miss a call due to jitter, brownouts, or call drops.
Intelligent traffic orchestration tools automatically correct a struggling call traffic connection by routing it to a better connection. This ensures reliable voice quality, data transfers and bandwidth availability.
Better Reliability for Key Public Services
A new call recording feature within the Unified Communications solution was also activated for the police department. This enables them to cost-effectively record calls with high voice quality connections in case the recordings might be used in court proceedings or judicial hearings. Built-in data backup within the Unified Communications solution are stored offsite with Commvault secure data storage. In the event of a disaster, Kent police call recordings and data are safe, and can be quickly restored and accessed in minutes.
