Urban Community of Bourget Airport Outsourced Its IT

This urban community comprises 100,000 residents in the towns of Le Bourget, Drancy, and Dugny, France. They needed a cost-effective IT solution to keep up with technological advances without relying on an in-house team.

Executive Summary

The Urban Community of Bourget Airport is the first urban community in France to completely outsource its IT operations for all of its public institutions, including schools, municipal police stations, and health centers. the community was required to fully separate infrastructure and Dedicated Connect links for video protection. It also required redundant Dedicated Connect links and used two different routes between the core of the community’s network and the OVHcloud data center.

Highlights

• 150 virtual machines for applications
• 1,000 virtual workstations
• 80 full HD video protection cameras
• 10 Gbps internet connection with 4x10 Gbps for data and 4x10 Gbps for video protection
• 7 OVHcloud Hosted Private Clouds

Challenges

For public entities, budgetary constraints are the norm. As such, the community was seeking a cost-effective IT solution that would enable it to keep up with technological advances without relying on in-house professionals. To do so, the IT manager needed to outsource the municipality’s entire server farm to a value-driven cloud provider.

     "On one hand, technology advances rapidly, and hardware is quickly obsolete. On the other, a public authority does not have the budget to regularly upgrade its machines, nor the funds to recruit experienced system administrators, whose salary expectations are elevated due to the shortage of such professionals in the IT sector. Therefore, outsourcing is the best solution.” – David Larose, IT Manager, Urban Community of Bourget Airport

Solution Delivered
OVHcloud directly connected the core of the community’s network to seven Hosted Private Cloud solutions in its data center through its Dedicated Connect solution.

One Dedicated Cloud is used solely to collect and store video protection data from 80 HD cameras and three more host business applications. Remote desktops also host 150 virtual machines, which include more than 60 apps, for government data.

In addition, OVHcloud extended fiber links to nearby towns — to establish interconnection points and enable the community to benefit from a 2x10 Gbps fiber connection with the security of a second loop with the same capacity —, and to two points of presence (PoP), so that data could be channeled through four distinct fiber links using two different routes. A pair of firewalls and a Cisco Sourcefire module were also deployed at one PoP to provide the community’s public employees with a redundant 10 Gbps internet connection.

Results, ROI, and Future Plans
The OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud allowed for platform sharing across applications and environments for greater agility, communication, and efficiency. The virtual desktop environment simplified template management, rapid deployment of remote desktops, and enhanced help desk support. With Dedicated Connect, OVHcloud can manage availability and performance from the interconnection points to the infrastructures.

   "The investment for pulling fiber to the towns of Bobigny and La Courneuve will see an ROI in 10 years, all while providing 100 times the bandwidth and the ability to communicate through a totally private network with our outsourced infrastructures.” – David Larose, IT Manager, Urban Community of Bourget Airport

Learn about The Urban Community of Bourget Airport's new IT infrastructure