Case Study: City of London

Sector:
Local Government

Business Objective:
Serve your customers better

With its website increasingly becoming the favoured source of information, the Corporation selected Kcom to provide high-speed connections and hosting.

The customer

City of London Corporation is well known for many things – from being the local authority for the financial powerhouse that is the Square Mile, to the Lord Mayor’s Show and, of course, to the most famous Lord Mayor of all, Dick Whittington.

Quick facts

The website serves 9,000 City of London residents
An average of 160,000 monthly visitors

The Challenge

Perhaps lesser known is the wider extent of the Corporation’s responsibilities, which also include policing and stretch beyond the business district to take in five Thames bridges, Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest and the Barbican Centre.

With its website increasingly becoming the favoured source of information, the Corporation selected Kcom to provide high-speed connections and hosting for www.cityoflondon.gov.uk.

Operating as a central portal through which an average of 160,000 monthly visitors can access local information, services and resources, the website serves 9,000 City of London residents, a working population of around a third of a million and UK and foreign visitors, including those interested in relocating.

Creating the right solution

Kcom’s response has been to install a managed hosting platform of physical and virtual servers from its Docklands data centre to the Guildhall and another key location.

In addition to information on local government services and an online payment system for customers, the website includes the Collage image database containing more than 20,000 works of art from the Corporation’s library and Guildhall collection. There is also an online facility to apply online for permission to film in the City, a major site for location photography.

Conclusion

Kcom’s complex hosting platform, highly tailored to the City of London’s requirements, provides the flexibility required to run the entire website and back-end applications and allows storage space and connectivity to be easily scaled to cope with future demand, arising from more services becoming available and greater levels of traffic.

What they say…

“We are using different servers to support the varied technology being utilised for our contrasting requirements. The team at Kcom understands what we are trying to achieve and this is a great help in the smooth deployment of this upgrade. They demonstrate that they are fully committed and this is paying off in a very professional way.”

Keith Harvey, City of London’s Senior Business Analyst

Winning contracts

Kcom won the contract through the Office of Government’s commerce procurement system that helps develop collaborative contracts and ways of working that can save time and money.