City of London deploys SASE to future-proof public infrastructure

Fuelled by a mandate to create “an experience for millions”, the City of London is aiming to redefine how connectivity utilising leading-edge technologies empowers residents, visitors and businesses. As part of this plan, it has forged a partnership with Roc Technologies.

The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile of the UK capital, with a dedicated mandate to “foster a vibrant and successful” location which is the beating heart of the UK’s financial industry.

Headquartered at Guildhall in the City of London, the corporation delivers a range of municipal functions including public services, policing oversight and open spaces management – while also promoting the interests of the UK’s principal international financial and professional services centre.

Its coverage spans the City of London Corporation, the City of London Police, the Barbican Centre, City of London schools, parks, libraries and protected heritage locations such as Epping Forest, the iconic ponds at Hampstead Heath and Mansion House. With over 200 locations, the City of London has to ensure connectivity reaches every employee, official, resident and visitor in its community.

The partnership with Roc Technologies is designed to build on this vision, helping the corporation advance digital innovation and further strengthen its position in the business and financial services sector. As a strategic partner, Roc will deliver an end-to-end networking connectivity service, encompassing what is said to be a UK-first enterprise secure access service edge (SASE) roll-out for public services, AI-driven wireless capability and high-availability internet.

Having reliable, high-speed access is designed to allow City of London Corporation staff to work productively and securely from any location. The service is based on the HPE AI-Ops platform, Juniper Mist, Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma SASE service and Vorboss business connectivity, via its dedicated, fully owned and managed central London fibre network. 

Roc’s technology will use cloud and AI capabilities for network delivery and services, incorporating the first public sector full enterprise deployment of SASE in the UK. This will in turn provide standardised, highly available connectivity to millions of users across the City of London, while simultaneously enhancing and automating security at the edge.

One particular demand in the contract was that the enhanced connectivity addressed critical public safety challenges such as ensuring support for 4K body-worn police cameras to help protect officers and the communities they serve, even in remote areas.

With all traffic and devices managed in the cloud, offering significant operational enhancements and cost savings, Roc’s service has protections such as safeguarding operations from their secure networks and security operations centre, and applying data controls including data loss prevention, zero trust networking access and alignment with UK policing standards.

All Roc suppliers and partners involved in the transformation and delivery of the service maintain resilient datacentre operations in the UK, ensuring no sensitive data leaves the UK.

“The City of London sees footfall of millions of people a day, so it’s vital that a consistent network experience is delivered across all locations and to all users, including visitors, residents and businesses regardless of the services they need to access,” said Roc Technologies chief technology officer Chelsea Chamberlin.

“We’re delighted to be the sole primary supplier for this exciting project, drawing on a range of solutions from our expert partners to deliver a truly future-proof network architecture in the heart of the capital.”