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Collaboration to Unify Government Communications

A Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solution designed for rapid scalability, security, redundancy, and availability is critical for future-proofing IT and communications infrastructure to enable organizational growth. However, a federal government body must meet specific architecture requirements to adhere to federal regulations when completing an IT and communications transition project.

Government bodies must also contend with vast IT infrastructure spanning hundreds of nationwide offices. To meet these challenges, BlueAlly assisted in designing, implementing, and supporting a federal government organization’s UC&C solution. The new UC&C platform effectively replaced the organization’s legacy enterprise voice-based communications systems, unifying communications capabilities across the organization.

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The responsible federal government body

This federal government body manages all IT hardware, software, and services required for daily operations at numerous government facilities and various assets in the federal government’s nationwide IT infrastructure.

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The responsible federal government body

This federal government body manages all IT hardware, software, and services required for daily operations at numerous government facilities and various assets in the federal government’s nationwide IT infrastructure.

The Problem

The federal organization’s legacy enterprise voice-based communications system was an on-premises, redundant platform with instances in two data centers. Our client wanted to implement a UC&C solution to support large and distributed service needs more efficiently, including approximately 7,000 endpoints in Washington, D.C., and additional endpoints in nationwide offices. The federal body’s previous, cloud-based unified communications solution was at the end of its lifecycle, with our client facing high costs to extend the solution while providing the same capabilities to its state offices as it had in its D.C. offices.

A project of this size presents substantial implementation challenges due to the number of systems requiring transition and the specific architecture and hosting requirements for each solution component. The organization also had to meet significant availability requirements for “always online” connectivity while maintaining the ability to scale rapidly as its IT and communications infrastructure grew.

The BlueAlly Solution

Our client approved BlueAlly’s UC&C solution design and collaborated to orchestrate the implementation of a state-of-the-art UC&C solution standardized on market-leading unified communications technologies from the Cisco Unified Communications portfolio. However, the platform’s design and implementation requirements called for more complex solutions than a simple architectural design solution, necessitating many application integrations to meet federal requirements. These included over 20 third-party applications integrated into the Cisco Unified Communications and Collaboration platform, combining on-premises and cloud hosting components for Unified Communications, Voice Messaging, Contact Center, Conferencing, Microsoft Teams Integration, Systems Administration, and more.

The federal government body’s UC&C solution was designed to ensure network, geographic, compute, application, and cloud redundancy, enhancing availability and resiliency. Due to federal security and privacy requirements, our client requested that BlueAlly design the solution to ensure the Cisco UC&C platform and all integrated applications share a common security framework and are monitored by our client’s existing security tools and team. BlueAlly worked closely with the federal body to provide end-user training and engineering training on implementing our client’s UC&C platform while planning and executing the transition of 100 offices in Washington, D.C. and more than 400 offices across the United States. BlueAlly currently provides ongoing operations and maintenance support for our client’s UC&C solution.

The Results

Through the partnership, the federal government body exceeded expectations and completed its massive IT and communications transition project in 18 months, integrating its D.C. and state campuses into the same UC&C platform for the first time. The solution meets our client’s unique architecture requirements and is designed for rapid scalability, redundancy, availability, and security, positioning the federal body for continued growth and organizational collaboration.

Scalability

Designed to support cloud-based systems to facilitate a future migration to hybrid or full-cloud infrastructure.

Cost Savings

Significant cost savings compared to extending the SAA’s previous unified communications platform.

Interoperability

Includes features familiar to users while integrating new functionality that users have requested.

Usability

Transformative ease-of-use and integration into existing workflows, streamlining communications and improving flexibility.

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