Ministry of Public Administration of Slovenia

High Reliability, High Security

The Ministry of Public Administration of Slovenia (MJU) provides a help desk service for more than 2 million citizens, civil servants and employees. To raise the efficiency of their user services and to promote electronic administration processes, the Ministry implemented e-Government – a State Portal of the Republic of Slovenia (e-Uprava), a meeting point of all information concerning public administration as well as the private sector.

A reliable remote desktop support service is an indispensable asset to guarantee the access and support to outsourced IT engineers, keep the Portal e-Uprava running and solve technical problems on time. Being a governmental authority, maximum security, beside reliability, is of utmost importance.

The Ministry requires remote desktop software to be installed on their internal servers, so all the data should always stay in-house.

“Given the multi-use of ISL Online we have accounted for 50 simultaneous connections during peak hours, with the software being able to support up to 500 simultaneous support sessions. From this point of view it is essential for the software to support central directories, for example RADIUS, as a source of external authentication,” explained Gregor Škerlep, a senior advisor at the Ministry of Public Administration.

Why ISL Online

ISL Online’s Corporate Server License proved to be the perfect solution for the MJU as it is designed for corporations and bigger institutions with large-scale needs for client support over the internet.

It offers the MJU exclusive rights to use ISL Online services without any limits on the number of active connections.

“The ISL Online technical team have installed one Corporate Server License on each of our two internal servers and created a Private Cloud, a system which offers nearly 100% reliability of the service,” explained Škerlep.

During peak hours, helpdesk operators establish on average 50 active sessions. The Private Cloud architecture distributes sessions to two servers according to the availability (load balancing). Private Cloud architecture also guarantees the reliability of the service as the system is fault tolerant.

Even in the case of hardware failure or errors affecting one server, all the sessions, even the active ones, can be transferred to another server. As all the data (session list, users etc.) are duplicated, the system also has a back-up solution for possible data recovery. The servers could also be geographically distributed in order to survive natural disasters. For example, one server can be located in one city and another server in another city or even another country.

Costs Fall by 50%

The Ministry estimates that without using ISL Online remote support and collaboration tools, IT expenditures would have been about 50% higher.

“Since we started using ISL Light, we have, for example, cut the cost of Secure ID cards (RSA) for different outsourced IT engineers that need to access and support state IT systems. With the help of ISL Light we enable them all to access internal systems through only one RSA key,” said Škerlep.

The lower costs and saved time was not the only benefit. By making external personnel work through ISL Online, the MJU has gained better control over their work. The Ministry could now see the exact time spent on a task and make revision of the work, as the sessions can be recorded.

“We solve almost 100% of all the technical issues through ISL Light, which is around 36,000 sessions per year. And the frequency of its use is increasing as we tend to solve more and more issues this way,” said Škerlep.

“ISL Online allows remote desktop support and access to remote computers from Apple mobile devices, so our internal system administrators and senior officials (Director General, Secretaries General) are able to administer servers or access their own PC workstations from virtually anywhere using their iPads or iPhones.”