The city of Surrey is one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada with 500,000 residents. With over 4,000 employees, the City of Surrey doubles-down on cloud technology to enable their auxiliary workers to access the city’s IT services from their personal devices and fully comply with BC’s FIPPA regulations.

CHALLENGE

The City of Surrey has a large number of auxiliary workers such as library staff and lifeguards who did not have access to the City’s IT services including the intranet, CityNet.

Providing ‘offsite’ workers with company-issued devices would enhance access and engagement but the cost of such a program would not be practical.

Thus, the City of Surrey needed a way to provide all employees secure and easy access to the information they needed, regardless of their physical location. They also had to take into account B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (BC FIPPA) that specifies that no public sector body can send personally-identifiable data outside the country without the consent of that individual.

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SOLUTION

The City selected Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as the base platform for the employee portal because it provides features such as multi-factor authentication and the ability to publish internal applications securely.

The City selected Softlanding to help move the EMS services to Microsoft’s Canadian datacenters. Together, the City of Surrey’s IT team and Softlanding determined that using on-premise Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) would allow for customization options that a cloud password sync would not.

To use the employee portal, staff would need to download Microsoft’s Authenticator app to their smartphones.

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RESULTS

Internal Resources Access to for All Employees

After making customizations and configurations to their ADFS and EMS portal, the City of Surrey could leverage cloud-based services to provide broad, Internet-based access to their employees via their devices, while complying with privacy regulations for public-sector bodies.

Better Communication & Flexibility with Deskless Workers

Auxiliary workers now have greater access to CityNet, the City’s primary mechanism for communicating with staff. Furthermore, desk-less workers can now securely access their paystubs, manage their expense reporting, modify their personal information, and review internal job postings from home, empowering them with enhanced flexibility and work-life balance.

Reduced IT Costs

IT costs have also been reduced by providing a simple mechanism for password resets.

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"Softlanding got it right the first time and they were hugely helpful. It was very complex work and we would not have been able to do it without them."

David Izzard, Architecture and Cyber Security Manager, City of Surrey

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