Covid-19: How G4S has coped with the lockdown

Nick Folkes, Group CIO of G4S, explains that his organisation has benefited from its long-term digital transformation programme, with most services already in the cloud. But there were significant challenges early on in the lockdown period, especially around some legacy applications

With the Covid-19 lockdown continuing indefinitely, organisations of all types are reconfiguring to enable long-term remote working.

Some are faring better than others. Broadly, organisations can be split into two. One group has been on a cloud journey for several years and is already used to remote working. The other has been slower to move systems and infrastructure to the cloud, and still has significant legacy challenges, often necessitating on premise staff.

G4S is very much in the former camp, with its Group CIO Nick Folkes telling computing four years ago about the organisation's drive to shift everything into the cloud. Today, they are reaping the rewards.

"We've been on a cloud journey for a number of years," begins Folkes. "There's only small amount of the patchwork quilt that needs attention. We went with Google five years ago, we're now fully on G-Suite. All file access, communications, hangouts, it's all worked seamlessly, and we're all used to using them," he adds.

In an average week G4S logs around 20,000 Google Hangouts meetings across the organisation, totalling 1.5 million minutes. Indeed it is via a Hangout that Computing speaks to Folkes.

"Now that's jumped to 90,000 meetings and 9 million minutes. And that's a huge testament to Google, as everyone else who uses their technology will have seen similar jumps, so they've absorbed a five to six-fold increase in volume," says Folkes.

He explains that this far into the organisations mammoth digital transformation programme, named Javelin, so many systems are natively in the cloud. That makes them "a doddle" to continue to use remotely, since they now mostly sit within IaaS offerings from Google or AWS.

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G4S offers a VPN service to many of its staff, but Folkes admits that this doesn't extend to every employee.

"So we've used Google," explains Folkes. "We've created a new VPN from Google back to all our offices to establish a private network, using Google Identity Aware Proxy for authentication to validate that access to Google.

"We layer that over any web service we put up into Google's cloud."

Folkes went on to explain what happens to the roughly 40 per cent of legacy applications which have yet to move to Google's IaaS platform.

"For those applications which are still stuck in an office somewhere, we've enabled virtual desktops in Google's cloud computing platform to bounce back via secure network to wherever the infrastructure lives.

"In the first week of lockdown that piece was missing, enabling remote access to legacy applications where there wasn't already a VPN. That was a hectic week given the size of our business."

However, the challenge was eased because there was so little fire-fighting to do elsewhere.

"G-Suite and our other cloud services all scale perfectly, and the vast majority of infrastructure has already moved to IaaS. So overall it was a fraught week, but we got it done."

Morale has remained high within the organisation, largely due to the seamless nature of the user experience.

"That week where we were scrabbling was tough. But largely the user experience for most people hasn't altered, because it's all in the cloud. If you're, for example, a finance clerk in a country where we haven't moved everything to the cloud, all we've done is enabled you to go via Google to access your services, we've just had to build a network link. For everyone else is business as usual. It's all been quite normal actually."