Bromsgrove District Council GCSX Project.

"We were looking for a company with the right level expertise and experience. Aristi's experts helped us better understand the GCSx CoCo requirements and the recommendations that they have made have helped us achiece real measurable cost savings." Mark Hanwell ICT Transformation Manager

Bromsgrove District Council (BDC) serves 92,000 residents and covers 84 square miles of urban and rural communities, with a third of the population based in Bromsgrove town and other population clusters in Hagley, Rubery and Wythall.

BDC are currently working very closely with Redditch Borough Council (RBC) as they move towards shared services in order to deliver potential savings of £1.2m initially and further annual savings of £500K.

BDC needed expert help and advice to manage and support both theirs and RBC’s compliance with the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSx) Code of Connection (CoCo). They also wanted to explore the possibility of consolidating both council connections to the GCSx network down to a single connection.

There was also an opportunity to reduce the scope of the services connected to the GCSx network which would greatly simplify it’s management and significantly reduce the cost of maintaining connectivity.

Aristi were awarded a three year contract to provide CLAS consultancy services to support compliance with the GCSx CoCo.

Previously both councils would have had to submit separate CoCo applications, one for each council, taking an aggregated approach will mean that they will now only have to submit one.

The three year contract will allow BDC to take advantage of expert consultancy to meet the requirements s of an aggregated CoCo, development of information security policies and guidance on the implementation of the required controls. Aristi will work with BDC to help maintain compliance with the CoCo over the period of the contract.

Aggregated connection to GCSx means one connection instead of two and at £22,620 per year for both connections, verses an aggregated cost of £16,894, BDC will save £17,178 over 3 years.

Penetration Testing Scope reduced from 140 servers to just 14 reducing the cost from approximately £12K per year to £4K per year saving £24K over 3 years.

The softer benefit is that their corporate network is not restrained by the CoCo standards and they can move ahead with projects without adding the high cost of compliance.