Enabling secure remote working in days

The City of Stockholm is Sweden’s largest municipality and home to over
960,000 people. In Stockholm, the digital maturity is high, and the goal is to
be the world’s smartest city by 2040. In the quest to reach its goal, the City of
Stockholm realized the needs of the educational institutions were different to
the needs of the City’s other institutions and plotted a new course with
multiple strategic partners.

Fujitsu Sweden is the partner of choice for all users within Stockholm’s educational sector. The idea is to give all students within the City of Stockholm a functioning digital education by enabling teachers, principals, and other employees within the City of Stockholm to have all the IT tools, support, and guidance required.

However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 students, teachers, and administrators were all forced to work from home with limited notice. This meant ensuring around 140,000 users had remote access enabled. Fujitsu had already been responsible for rolling out Europe’s largest Microsoft 365 educational deployment in the City, consisting of 800 administrative offices, schools, and preschools; 130,000 users and devices; and 10 million group memberships.

“We already had the platform and processes in place to enable homeworking, but we were struggling to scale to cope with so many concurrent users,” explains Andreas Cassne, IT Delivery Strategist at City of Stockholm. “We had to work with Fujitsu to strengthen the connectivity and security while ensuring we could handle the volume.”

Due to Fujitsu’s deep technical expertise with the City of Stockholm, it redesigned the network to cope with up to 10,000 simultaneous users while extending Microsoft 365 service monitoring. The service desk was prepared with content related to the new environment. Fujitsu also worked with other partners to ensure networks and logins were optimized for remote working. All these measures enabled Stockholm’s students to hit the ground running in just a few days.

At the same time, Fujitsu remained responsible for the contract’s daily services: imaging and deploying around to 20,000 new Windows, iOS, Android, and Chromebook devices each year. It is also accountable for the ongoing application services, security, and endpoint protection and this has helped the schools to avoid malicious attacks.

“From a user perspective, it was simple to switch to homeworking because they all had their own school-issued device and we took care of any background issues,” adds Cassne. “It was considerably smoother than you might expect, especially when it came to getting all 140,000 accounts onto one active directory, for example.”

The City of Stockholm is now confident it can maintain the effective teaching of its students. Thanks to Fujitsu’s diligent support, it pivoted to remote working without disruption. This massive shift in learning generated a higher volume of requests to the service desk, which Fujitsu handled seamlessly while maintaining an impressive first fix-rate.

Now, tens of thousands of users can log on securely and access all the tools, applications, and content they require. It is a flexible, multi-platform environment that allows users to select the device and OS they prefer, without limiting support. Fujitsu continues to work with the City of Stockholm to help it reach its goal of providing all students with good and equal opportunities to learn, to grow as individuals, and to be part of a democratic society.