Improving St Paul’s Cathedral Remote Working Capacity

CIS has worked closely with the IT department at St Paul’s Cathedral for many years. As both organisations observed, the COVID-19 outbreak unfold across the world.

Project Overview

Client:

St. Paul’s Cathedral

Category:

Cloud

St Paul's Cathedral viewed between office buildings

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, St Paul’s Cathedral needed to expand remote working quickly. CIS worked with the cathedral’s internal IT team to increase capacity and make its business applications available to more staff working from home.

The challenge

The existing Remote Desktop Services platform supported occasional home working. It was not sized for the number of staff who would need to use it at the same time. Performance and resilience both needed attention.

The work

We used the existing platform as the basis for an expanded service, working with the cathedral’s team to include the applications staff needed.

Multiple Remote Desktop Host servers provided additional capacity and redundancy. A Gateway and Broker server supported access and load balancing. The environment sat behind Sophos XG firewalls, with access restricted to authenticated VPN users.

The result

The expanded platform supported a larger remote workforce and could be extended using the established server template.

I knew I needed a more robust remote environment, and quickly. Working as a team, collaboratively, with CIS has made the project the success that it was.

Garry Hunter, Head of IT, St. Pauls Cathedral

Explore our IT support for heritage organisations and support for internal IT teams.