Loudoun County: A State and Local Government IT Success Story
Published: September 19, 2022
Loudoun County has seen extensive growth within their community over the last few years. With more and more citizens coming in but not enough IT bandwidth to support it, Network Manager Ken Olson was facing serious challenges.
State and local governments are high-paced, high-demand environments. Ken realized that quickly when he joined the team. That is why he partnered with Extreme Networks to revamp their IT infrastructure to meet the constantly evolving demand of their citizens.
“Coming into a county government from a commercial industry I didn’t really expect the pace to be what it is at the county. It is much higher pace and higher demand than what I expected” – Ken Olson, Network Manager
Recently, Extreme Networks hosted a webinar that dove into Loudoun County’s digital transformation and how Extreme was there to help. If you didn’t catch the webinar live, watch it on-demand now or read on for a summary and short clips highlighting what Loudoun County shared!
Upgraded Network Infrastructure
Loudoun County wanted a network that was stable and resilient but straightforward enough for their IT team to learn and manage. Their demands were met thanks to shortest path bridging with Extreme Fabric Connect. Once deployed, short path bridging enabled the IT staff at Loudoun County to manage their network through automation to limit disruptions to network connections. This helped keep the community running efficiently and securely, providing an added layer of safety as public safety departments were working without interruption to provide their services to their citizens.
The Issue Isn’t Always the Network
State and local government IT teams are always busy. They are responsible for keeping the community running, ensuring that citizens can connect with government agencies, securing confidential files and information, and maintaining the network to keep emergency services connected.
With all those responsibilities, Loudoun County’s IT staff does not have time to seek network issues that don’t exist! With the help of ExtremeAnalytics, Ken and his team can now identify the real issues and how to solve them rather than chasing down phantom solutions.
To do this, ExtremeAnalytics provides the team with documentation to show network performance versus application performance to identify when issues are a result of a network issue or an application issue.
Why Extreme Networks for your State, Local, or County Government
Loudoun County and Extreme Networks came together to create a network that could keep up with the constantly evolving demands of the community, keeping citizens and government agencies connected.
When we asked Senior Network Engineer Klint Radwani how he felt about their decision to pick Extreme, he shared that he feels that “switching is switching, and routing is routing. I have worked on every vendor’s equipment that I can think of in the industry, and they are all capable of moving packets along. I think that the relationship that we have with Extreme is built on trust. They are an extension of our team, and I have a lot of trust in them from engineering recommendations to help with any other issues we encounter."