Jaén Provincial Council: virtual applications for 137 agencies

• Name: Jaén Provincial Council

• Sector: Public

• Employees: 1,300

• Municipalities: 97

• Remote Offices: 40

• Location: Jaén, Andalucia (Spain)

Jaén Provincial Council is undergoing an ambitious process of digital transformation that is turning it into an innovative, accessible and closer to citizens’ administration. One of its main roles is to provide IT tools to the 97 city councils that make up this territorial unit and to the 40 remote offices in the Provincial Council, which are scattered across the province. “To overcome the complexity of providing applications to all municipalities and offices, we decided to rely on application virtualization with UDS Enterprise“, explained Jesús Dorado, Head of the Technical Architecture System of the Jaén Provincial Council. “After analyzing some similar solutions, we found that this connection broker is the one that best meets our needs and, in addition, is really cost-effective”, he commented.

The use of this technology brings significant time and resources savings, since it keeps IT staff from moving physically throughout the province to maintain all workspaces updated. “This vApp solution allows us to provide centralized support to each of the city councils and provincial offices. Among other advantages, just by updating our servers we make sure that all users have the same version of the application”, said Dorado.

Around 850 users access daily through their web browser about 38 virtual applications from the different municipalities and offices of Jaén Provincial Council. This number of users is increasing weekly, since due to the modernization of the administrations “more and more employees need access the applications”, pointed out the Head of the System of Technical Architecture.

Application virtualization with UDS Enterprise allows them to provide vApp, for example, to automate the daily operations of town halls (Open Local) or electronic administration applications from the digital processing platform MOAD-H. It is also used to give access to the staff of the municipalities to different web platforms through the Nerea Network, which connects telematically all bodies of the Autonomous Community of Andalucía.

Jaén Provincial Council’s offices use the connection broker to work with programs to manage nursing homes, community social services or access the different e-government web platforms of the Provincial Council.

With UDS Enterprise, all applications are provided in high availability, thus avoiding possible downtime or waiting periods and guaranteeing a 24/7 service without interruptions for users of the vApp.

“The experience with this technology is highly positive, we have proven that it offers benefits at the level of communications and virtualization of applications not available from other tools that we have implemented and that it consumes very few bandwidth resources”, evaluated Dorado.

Custom developments for the Council

In addition to the innovative features and high performance of UDS Enterprise, the Jaén Provincial Council also highlighted the ease of use of the solution and its ability to simplify the administration of the whole IT infrastructure. “Thanks to this connection broker, the management of the entire operating environment has been significantly simplified“, said the IT specialist.

Another of the differentiating features of this solution are, according to Dorado, “its fast and personalized support service” and the possibility of participating in its roadmap. “We have suggested new features that have already been incorporated into the product, such as high availability for Windows applications or the possibility that users of an Active Directory can directly open their applications without using mapping users”, he explained.

From the Jaén Provincial Council are already thinking about leveraging other advantages of UDS Enterprise. “We are planning to implement VDI with UDS Enterprise soon, we have decided to do it after analyzing the good results that this technology is providing us”, concluded Dorado.

VIRTUALIZED APPLICATIONS WITH UDS ENTERPRISE

For Municipalities:

• Complaint Management

• Open Local (City Councils’ BackOffice)

• MOAD-H Platform (Platform for Electronic Administration and Files Processing)

• Access to web platforms through the Nerea Network:

  • Demanda Vivienda (Housing)

  • DGT Arena 2 (Traffic)

  • DGT Atex (Traffic)

  • DGT Puntos (GESDEJE) (Traffic)

  • FNMT (Certificates)

  • Hermes Justicia (Law)

  • Ida Censo Electoral (Electoral Register)

  • Ida Padrón (Census)

  • Plataforma Intermediación (Intermediation platform)

  • Pretransparencia (Transparency)

  • Sirmi (Social welfare)

  • VioGen (Gender-based violence)

For Provincial Council:

• ResiPlus (Nursing homes management)

• Acivit (Community Social Services Management)

• Electronic Government Dashboard (Access to web platforms of the Provincial Council)

  • Portafirmas (Electronic Document Signature)

  • Intranet (Employees Portal)

  • Admir@ (Document Review)

  • Comunic@ (Internal Communications)

  • Verifirm@ (Electronic Signature Verification)

  • Registr@ (Provincial Council’s Electronic Register)

vApp INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 6.0

• Connection protocol: RDP (HTML5 and RDS)

• Authenticator: Active Directory and IP validation

• vApp OS: Windows

• Access OS: Windows and Linux

• Hardware: Virtualization environment in VMware made up of 4 HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 servers connected to a HP 3PAR 7200 storage array. 4 RDS Virtual Servers for application virtualization