How Berkeley Pivoted to Remote Work and Telehealth

This article first appeared in Government Technology, sister publication to Techwire.

As part of an effort to revamp its IT infrastructure, Berkeley has worked with Nutanixand a couple of other companies to implement new software to increase scalability, opening up new doors for remote work and telehealth options.

Before implementing the new technology, the city’s infrastructure consisted of a three-tier platform that was unreliable and unscalable, according to Savita Chaudhary, the city’s IT director.

“The legacy infrastructure was complex to troubleshoot, sometimes resulting in long-lasting outages,” Chaudhary said.

Those outages would then impact various departments, including police, fire, public works, planning, health services and housing and community services.

To prevent this from happening, the city implemented a new system last year, not long before the pandemic hit the U.S.

Before implementing the system, the city had zero remote workers, according to Chaudhary. Since its implementation, that number has grown to approximately 700 employees.

“This project indirectly impacted the remote working problem for us,” she said. “Our servers and storage were more than seven to eight years old, and we were due for a replacement.”

Not long after deciding to replace these systems, she said, the city found and started working with Nutanix.

“We had just completed this project right before the pandemic hit,” Chaudhary said. “When COVID happened, our infrastructure was stable, so we were able to just focus on implementing remote work options for employees.”

After that, the process of going remote happened fairly quickly.

“We activated our emergency operations center, which was given funding pretty quickly,” she said. “We then focused on purchasing equipment and software for MicrosoftTeams, as well as deploying Citrix to make cybersecurity changes to allow our employees to work remotely.”

Tapan Mehta, Nutanix’s director of industry solution marketing, said the company’s role was in simplifying the city’s old three-tier infrastructure so it could work in a single appliance.

“The analogy I use a lot of the time,” Mehta said, “is just like you have iOS for Apple users or Android for Google users as an app developer, you have the beauty of developing apps that can run on any Apple or Google devices.”

The city found other benefits in the partnership as well.

"We have been able to significantly reduce the amount of physical hardware we were using by switching to a single system, resulting in energy savings of up to 50 percent,” Chaudhary said.

The city also set up an off-site disaster recovery system for events such as earthquakes.

"As we continue to go through major system transitions and adapt to this changing world,” Chaudhary said, “we now have the capability to scale up our infrastructure and support the new initiatives and solutions for our growing needs and services.”