Benefits
The PSBA network is a data communications network, which enables voice, video and data to be carried over a single infrastructure. The benefits derived by the public sector from the PSBA include:
All Wales network coverage
The PSBA network covers the whole of Wales. Gateways are also provided into Janet (for education) and N3 (for health). In many areas of Wales much increased network capacity has been brought by The PSBA Network.
Resilient networking
The PSBA network has been designed from the start to provide service continuity. State-of-the art systems and fail-over capabilities are used to provide a highly resilient architecture in the Core. This can be extended to user sites provided it is designed in.
Reduction in total Costs
By consolidating effort and expenditure into a single technology platform managed by a single organisation, Wales will realise productivity gains.
No longer will dozens of individual sectors each need to procure and purchase their own wide area networking services. Instead, everyone will be using a technology platform built from common infrastructural elements.
Local aggregation of needs will enable different sectors to use the same network connection and drive down their combined connection costs.
Quality of Service (QOS)
Each customer’s WAN can be configured to support QoS as standard, allowing business critical applications and time-sensitive traffic (such as VoIP, thin client application and video) to be prioritised across the network. QoS makes the best use of the bandwidth and enables flexibility in the system to allow more bandwidth to be used, if required and where available QoS is an integral part of the network. This makes VOIP, for example, a realistic and cost-saving proposition.
Network monitoring
Specialised network-monitoring tools allow the PSBA team to monitor network performance and to anticipate issues. Information is accessible via the PSBA secure portal which allows users see the state of the network at any time
24/7 Support
The psba service centre provides 24/7 cover and pro-active fault finding. The PSBA team acts as a single point of contact for overall communications. By offering a single point of contact, PSBA customers only need to call one number to determine and resolve the problem.
Improved Collaboration
The secondary benefits are dependent on a variety of other projects, initiatives and departments. However, the goal is clear: to increase the quality and quantity of information sharing across public service organisations in Wales and deliver a better service to its people.
Video conferencing is one example of this - where professionals from different sectors and geographies could join forces to deliver improved quality of service at a minimum cost.