“Network is more than just connectivity, it’s about what it means for the people and organizations of Breda”

The beautiful municipality of Breda, located in the province of Brabant, boasts a rich history as a fortified city, having served as a hub of European commerce and culture for centuries. The ‘Pearl of the South’, as it’s often called, is the former residence of the ancestors of the Dutch royal family: the Nassaus.

Hundreds of years later, Breda is one of the frontrunners of digital government. As such, the municipality is actively seeking new ways to convert data from networks into actionable insights and information in order to improve its services for the citizens.

“It’s so much more than just issuing passports and disposing of household waste. Everything is connected to everything these days, so the real question is: what do we, the people and organizations of Breda, want from the city and how does the network infrastructure contribute to this?”, asks Clemens Garritsen, Head of ICT at the Municipality of Breda. “For example, the network can play a role in the planning of emptying glass containers. Or provide information on traffic flows, gatherings and crowd movements around the city, which is relevant for establishing parking policy and maintaining public order. We are also working on a smart lighting system that will increase safety and contribute to our sustainability ambitions”.

Clemens Garritsen has worked for the municipality of Breda for about 12 years, managing 43 people who are jointly responsible for the municipal network infrastructure, data centers, telephony and cloud platform. His team is running the IT and network for all 40 municipal locations. The municipality employs approximately 3,000 people and serves 3,700 end users, including those from the organizations that have a Service Agreement with the municipality, like the West-Brabant tax authorities, CJG Drimmelen Geertruidenberg and the municipality of Drimmelen, which are too small to financially support their own ICT.

The municipality of Breda provides all of these smaller institutions with an ICT infrastructure and hosts their applications, creating an added value as a regional heavyweight. But everyone knows that even the biggest champions have their limits…

“Municipalities are increasingly becoming an information factory”, as Garritsen puts it. “We now use and manage about 700 applications and offer employees a broad range of IT services, including telephony and workplace management. Unsurprisingly, managing information has grown more and more diverse and complex for us. We do a lot of management in-house, but increasingly outsource to trusted IT partners”.

To prepare for the aforementioned challenges, the municipality of Breda has been working on a major upgrade of its IT infrastructure. Conscia, a leading service provider in the Netherlands, was tasked with deploying and managing the municipality’s entire network infrastructure, from its core to the edge, including switches in the data centers, Wi-Fi and firewalls.

“Network is more than just connectivity, it’s about what it means for the people and organizations of Breda. We want to convert the data from those networks into knowledge and information that can help us improve our services as a municipality”, Clemens Garritsen explains. “Conscia’s role in all this was not limited to implementing the technology; It’s more about helping us materialize our vision of the value that the municipality should deliver to its residents and companies”.

To that end, the modernization began with the replacement of the installed base in the data center by the latest appliances and core switches from Extreme, soon to be followed by new access switches. To make the life of the local ICT team’s easier, the entire data center infrastructure has been based on the Extreme Fabric Connect solution, which eventually got expanded with new functionalities like the Fabric Attach.

“Extreme's Fabric technology makes deploying both temporary and permanent infrastructure faster and more cost-effective. The solution provides significant improvements in network management. IT administrators perform far less configurations in fewer places, which saves us a lot of work. Essentially, the network does a lot by itself”, says Roger Lahaye, ICT Architect of the city of Breda. “Fabric also minimizes the risk of errors due to misconfigurations, thus increasing network availability and uptime. Changes take less time, so we can focus on other, more strategic tasks”.

In time, the Wi-Fi infrastructure will be replaced by new Extreme access points: AP410C at major locations and the AP305C at smaller sites. All locations of the municipality and the organizations with a Service Agreement are connected to the data center and to each other via fiber with the city hall as the pivot. The municipality is using the ExtremeCloud IQ platform for management and backup. In the long run, XIQ will also be used for control and analytics in the rollout of the Extreme Wi-Fi network.

Like in case of many organizations, Breda was challenged by the time of COVID. Fortunately, the municipality invested early and extensively in mobility, using Extreme Networks technology and Microsoft applications.

Clemens Garritsen, who has taken on the supervising role, drew up a plan to move the network to the cloud no less than six years ago. In the meantime, the municipality has been working with Office 365 for almost four years and has also started a-choose-your-own-device initiative around that time.

“We have fully grown in this digital age, so we know the needs of the employees. These became even more evident during the pandemic but thanks to our prior investments, we felt prepared”, says the ICT Head at the Municipality of Breda. “Obviously, employees required some degree of support in working from home, but the infrastructure was already there. In two days, everyone was up and running so the IT team could concentrate on creating adoption”.

In the future, according to Roger Lahaye, the municipality is going to want to do more with self-service and automation based on Software Defined Networking solutions, which Extreme is poised to deliver this summer.

“Hybrid working impacts the infrastructure. The emphasis on the use of applications by our employees is shifting from connectivity with the data center to connectivity with the Internet. As an IT team, we must of course facilitate this in an efficient and secure way”, says the ICT Architect of Breda City. “We are very pleased that SDN and automation on the Extreme switches in our on-premise datacenter will make the network management tasks for our IT team a lot easier”

John Rutgers, Senior Account Executive from the Extreme Networks team in Benelux, is very happy that a loyal customer like Breda is making progress with innovative technology.

“The municipality has a clear vision of its role in society and towards citizens and businesses in Breda. This vision is an example for other cities and government organizations”, says John Rutgers. “Our technology will support this infrastructure strategy in the coming years. The ExtremeCloud IQ software solution, in combination with the Extreme Fabric Connect technology, plays a crucial role in this. Conscia is a highly skilled partner and embraces our new cloud strategy based on automation, easy-to-configure deployment and management, and better security”.

Clemens Garritsen's social vision requires that the municipality has its basics in order. Conscia and Extreme's services are crucial in this regard, because all network components must contribute to make that vision possible. The switches and hosting servers, the access points and the firewall are all fundamental assets of the architecture of the future.

“Government is like the spider’s web of information within the municipality and in the region. A future-proof infrastructure must be able to adjust how municipal services fulfill a role towards citizens, companies and partners”, says ICT Head at the Municipality of Breda. “We don’t have a crystal ball so nobody knows what the world will look like in five years. However, it is clear that all citizens and companies are in the midst of a transition to the cloud. The world is constantly changing, and with it – everything we do as users. That is why we need to have a clear picture of our added value for society”.

Conscia is a leading European IT specialist in networking, cyber security, and cloud providing secure infrastructure solutions and 24-7 managed services to clients with complex network, data center, cloud, IOT, and mobility demands. Conscia delivers best-in-class technical competencies and insights, and as a trusted advisor strives to support customers’ business-critical technology systems across the entire life cycle from design, implementation, operation, to optimization.