Key information
Decision type: Assistant Director
Reference code: ADD2071
Date signed:
Decision by: David Munn, Head of Information Technology
Executive summary
The GLA’s Citrix environment was built in 2014 and is used for home and remote working for up to 800 members of staff. This system allows staff to securely access a GLA desktop from a variety of non-GLA devices, such as people’s home PC or personal tablet device. This system needs to be upgraded and a new support service put in place.
Decision
That the Head of Technology approves spend of up to £50,000 from existing Technology Group budget for an upgrade of Citrix and a new support service for the upgraded system.
Part 1: Non-confidential facts and advice
The GLA’s technology group (TG) implemented a replacement remote access solution in 2014 under approval DD1167. The resulting solution successfully provides home and/or remote working for up to 800 members of staff by allowing staff to securely access a GLA desktop from a variety of non-GLA devices, such as their home computer or tablet device. A key component of this solution is a group of Citrix servers which are now due to be upgraded. The total cost of this solution including up to 3 years’ support will be no more than £50,000 over three years.
The objective of this project is to build upon the GLA’s existing remote access infrastructure in order to provide an up-to-date, user friendly and supported remote access experience. The outcome of this project will be an upgraded and supported Citrix environment for the provision of a good quality remote access service for GLA staff.
This solution supports remote and flexible working. In addition the software component of the solution (Citrix) provides accessibility tools that will be enabled as part of this upgrade.
1. The strategic objective of the GLA is to move all services into the “Cloud” (externally hosted). Once this process is fully complete then it is expected that there will be no need for a remote access solution of this type. This process is, however, expected to take at least three years and therefore end users are dependent upon this solution in the interim.
2. A risk has been identified with continuing but not replacing our existing solution by June 2017 as this is the point at which our current version of Citrix software goes out of support.
Approval is being sought to spend up to £50,000 to upgrade the Citrix system and provide a support service for three years. The expenditure is broken down as below;
2016/17: up to £20,000 one off payment for implementation work
2017/18: up to £10,000 for support services
2018/19: up to £10,000 for support services
2019/20: up to £10,000 for support services.
The expenditure will be funded from the existing TG Programme Delivery budget for each financial year.
Signed decision document
ADD2071 Citrix Upgrade Project 2017 (signed) PDF