Municipality of Het Hogeland: stable IT infrastructure with Duocast

Like the business world, government bodies are also moving with the digitalisation of society. For the municipality of Het Hogeland, this means that citizens must be able to access digital services online, and that civil servants carry out most of their work digitally. This requires reliable IT infrastructure, with applications, data, and connections that are always available.

The municipality of Het Hogeland, formed on 1 January 2019 through the merger of De Marne, Bedum, Winsum, and Eemsmond, covers a large part of the province of Groningen and is one of the largest municipalities in the Netherlands by area.

Preparing for the future: connectivity and security

Due to the size of the municipality, civil servants work across multiple locations. Citizens need to be able to reach the municipality easily, and employees need access to their applications and data everywhere. This calls for stable internet connections, virtual workplaces, and secure links to central government databases such as the Land Registry (Kadaster) and the Municipal Personal Records Database (GBA). Jurrie van der Deen, Senior IT Officer at the municipality, explains why Het Hogeland chose Duocast:

“We wanted to serve 750 users from a central environment, with stable connections between all our locations. We also wanted to keep the option open for a twin data centre configuration for extra resilience.”

The Duocast solution

To achieve this, the municipality chose to work with Duocast. Thanks to the data centre, the municipality can deliver the required availability and continuity using its own equipment and applications, in an environment optimised for exactly that purpose.

A key benefit is the greatly improved connectivity between locations. Where previously a single server room in Leens formed a vulnerable “single point of failure”, the infrastructure is now fully redundant. Internet connections are stable and dependencies have been reduced or completely removed from the network.

No-nonsense regional partnership

For Van der Deen, Duocast’s no-nonsense approach and regional presence are at least as important as the technology:

“You quickly build a good working relationship. You can have technical discussions, but the end-user perspective always remains central. Everything around power, climate control, and physical security is taken care of, so we can focus on our own work.”