Written by Cameron Turnbull
Account Manager
Northgate Public Services Drive Global Collaboration and Enjoy Seamless Business Continuity at Scale with Google Workspace
THE CHALLENGE
Northgate Public Services has a large international workforce to manage its wide range of vital public sector solutions, with colleagues operating in locations from the UK and Ireland through to India and Australia.
Business continuity was already high on its agenda. To help these different business units work together more effectively, in 2014 Northgate carried out a strategic initiative to implement a new environment allowing rapid and secure collaboration across projects and documents. However, as certain processes had to remain on existing systems for compliance and operational reasons, the transition couldn’t be a simple rip and replace.
With many of Northgate‘s critical services needing to stay live and uninterrupted to support citizens and public bodies, business continuity needed to be baked into the new solution. Northgate was already using G Suite and Google Workspace across the business, and when the urgent requirement came for the entire business to work from home due to the unprecedented pandemic, NPS had the tools at its fingertips to be able to move seamlessly to homeworking.
THE SOLUTION
With the core infrastructure already in place, Northgate chose Appsbroker as its strategic partner to help roll out more elements of Google Workspace globally due to their proactive and hands-on, collaborative approach, their open and honest communication and their experience driving similar enterprise-wide Google Workspace projects.
A Google Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner with experience stretching back to the earliest large-scale Google Workspace deployments, Appsbroker was able to bring a wealth of understanding of the technological and cultural nuances of a large-scale Workspace implementation. Northgate smoothly transitioned its global teams to homeworking without disruption to vital processes and enhanced their collaborative ways of working across its Safety, Health and Government and Housing teams.
When COVID-19 forced the world into a new way of working, Northgate was able to remain at the forefront and continue with business as usual across its vital public services.
THE RESULTS
The impact of the pandemic led to an increase in demand for Northgate‘s services for citizens, such as revenues and benefits. Northgate managed to keep its services running while expanding its team. Employee engagement also increased, with colleagues carrying out charity fundraising initiatives such as the Move 5 Challenge (5 kilometre run, walk, swim, cycle) encouraging other colleagues to take part through the use of Currents, and the group CEO becoming able to carry out interactive town halls through Google Meet, instead of travelling from location to location.
“The intuitive features and collaborative capabilities we have with Google Workspace have proved to be integral to our business operations, especially during COVID-19. The good working relationship we have with Appsbroker has enabled us to respond to the demands of the business at a challenging time, as well as helping us maintain business as usual activity in migrating recently acquired companies by Northgate onto Google Workspace.”
Sharon Pierson, Business Relationship Manager at Northgate Public Services
KEY STATISTICS
- 4 million peak minutes of Google Meet usage worldwide in a lockdown month
- Increase from 20,000 to 40,000 Google Meet sessions from January to June 2020
- Business continuity across 3,350 global Workspace licences per month during COVID-19
BACKGROUND
Northgate Public Services delivers a wide range of software and outsourcing solutions, which underpins critical police, health, housing and government services, ensuring delivery of the right data at the right time to protect and improve people’s lives.
CONTACT US
+44 (0) 1793 391 420
[email protected]
www.appsbroker.com
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