The Challenges Of Deploying Box In Local Government

One of the ways Box is seeking to increase adoption of its cloud collaboration platform is to add more security and governance features that will not only attract the attention of public sector CIOs but also allow such organisations to abide by local data privacy regulations.

Local authorities in the UK are paying attention. David Kasonga, a business and systems analyst, has been working in both the private and public sector, including at Central Bedfordshire Council, over the past five years and has experience deploying Box for local government.

For his most recent project he had no input in the purchase decision and was instead tasked with the rollout for a council.

‘Like Wildfire’

“I joined local government in July last year,” he tells TechWeekEurope at Boxworks 2016 in San Francisco. “I was asked to run a pilot of 150 licences not knowing what Box was and I had to make sense of it and see if it could work.

“The pilot was really successful and the more people used it the more they wanted to use it. It picked up like wildfire. I struggled to maintain the 150 licence cap and asked for more. The pilot ran from November until March this year.”

“Since March, we’ve been revising the settings and configuration and we’ve started the [general] deployment.”

Why Box?

Box says it targets a completely new market and tries to win over potential customers by promising to make existing processes more efficient and demonstrating entirely new ways of working. But it also has competition.

To differentiate itself, Box stresses its platform has been built with enterprise customers in mind, and claims its feature set, ease of use, and compliance and security tools are second to none. Given the types of data local government services work with, this is unsurprising.

Regular readers of TechWeek will be no stranger to stories of local government workers losing unencrypted USB sticks or laptops containing sensitive data, a problem a secure cloud product can help solve.

“From my understanding, the [client] had looked at a few cloud providers,” Kasonga continues. “Box was the favoured option because of the security around it. It enabled the council staff to be more productive.

Quiz: What do you know about the cloud in 2016?

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