Long-term partners

Newcastle-under-Lyme council has used NEC Revenues & Benefits for many years, with the solution previously hosted in its in-house data centre. However, with running costs rising and IT staff under pressure, they opted to boost cybersecurity and resilience by moving to our cloud.

Since December 2022, the council has deployed our revenues and benefits solution via our cloud managed service. This creates an advanced SaaS solution that supports both the revenues and benefits and IT teams.

Better security, better performance

By hosting the application in our Tier 3 datacentres, we manage all of the security and disaster recovery elements on top of the management aspects such as upgrades, patching and maintenance. There’s also built-in support for their year-end processes and we guarantee 99.5% availability.

Rosie Bloor, the council’s Customer Hub Manager, explains the difference it made at year end:

“We were used to a well-performing revenues and benefits solution, but since moving to NEC’s fully-managed cloud there’s been a noticeable difference in speed. It’s much faster than even we were expecting.”

Now, the council can stay focused on delivery, safe in the knowledge that the latest cybersecurity protections and maintenance procedures are in place and that they can call on the right expertise when they need it.

Working closely together

We worked closely with the team ahead of the change so we could get everything in place for annual billing. Migrations can be tricky, but we were able to move fast to help, like spinning up two additional databases to properly replicate their on-premise deployment.

The council can now focus on the future, like getting more from our Citizen Access self-service solution. Their business continuity plans are also stronger and they’ve got far greater certainty on cost too, with no hardware refresh or maintenance to plan for.

To find our more about our Cloud Services, visit our NEC Cloud page.