The Challenge
The state government's IT infrastructure had been built incrementally over 15 years — each department procuring its own equipment from different vendors, resulting in a fragmented landscape of incompatible systems, unsupported hardware, and inconsistent security configurations. The state's primary citizen services portal had experienced 23 unplanned outages in the preceding year, affecting public service delivery for millions of residents.
There was no centralised visibility into the network. Individual department IT staff handled incidents reactively, often with limited technical capability and no access to spare equipment. Mean time to resolution for network incidents averaged 6.8 hours — a figure that caused significant disruption to citizen-facing services including land records, vehicle registration, and social welfare payment processing.
The state government's digital transformation initiative required a stable, secure, and centrally managed IT foundation. Without it, the citizen-facing applications being built by the government's software teams had no reliable infrastructure to run on.
Our Solution
UDS conducted a 6-week infrastructure assessment across all 120 departments, cataloguing every network device, server, and connectivity link. The assessment produced a prioritised modernisation roadmap that distinguished between critical citizen-service infrastructure (Phase 1) and administrative back-office systems (Phase 2 and 3).
The network backbone was redesigned as a hub-and-spoke architecture with a state data center at its core. All 120 departments were connected via MPLS leased lines with SLA-backed bandwidth guarantees. Critical departments received redundant connectivity via a secondary MPLS path on a different carrier. The network was segmented with VLANs and protected by next-generation firewalls at all boundary points.
UDS established a dedicated Network Operations Centre for the state government, staffed 24/7 by certified network engineers. The NOC monitors all 120 locations using a centralised SNMP and flow-based monitoring platform, with automated alerting and escalation workflows. Incident response SLAs were defined at three tiers: P1 (citizen service impacting) with 30-minute response, P2 with 2-hour response, and P3 with 4-hour response.
Our managed IT support team deployed spare equipment kits at 12 regional hubs, enabling field engineers to achieve rapid hardware swap-outs without waiting for central procurement. A spare parts logistics system was integrated with the NOC's incident management platform to automate dispatch.
Results
- 60% reduction in network-related downtime in the first 12 months
- Mean time to resolution reduced from 6.8 hours to 47 minutes
- Zero citizen-service portal outages in the 8 months following NOC go-live
- 120 departments connected to centralised monitoring and management
- Network security posture improved: zero successful intrusion attempts detected in first year
- The state government expanded the engagement to cover 40 additional sub-district offices