New intranet rolled out to 350,000 civil servants

The UK government is moving 150 of its departments to a more secure IT network and intranet in a bid to improve communication in the public sector.

Service provider Energis, which completed the first phase of the £60m contract last week, said the Government Secure Intranet (GSi) will allow civil servants to communicate over departments through peer-to peer technology and virtual private networks.

Andrew Swaffer, GSi client director for Energis, said: "In government [peer-to-peer] is fundamentally very hard to do. There has been a tendency to outsource services and decentralisation has taken place. That's been good for the taxpayer but not so good for sharing information. But with this there is a central point to communicate securely through."

Some have described the GSi as the government's private internet service provider, which traditionally supported email and intranet. The new version also features an intranet but is designed as a web portal to feed public policies to 350,000 civil servants at all levels of government.

Energis has boasted that it completed the first phase of the project in 15 months - well ahead of the 2007 deadline.

OGCbuying.solutions and the E-government Unit were also involved in the project. A spokesman for OGC said: "With the efficiency drive and departments working smarter, the GSi as a hub for shared services really comes to the fore as it provides secure systems for communication. We are very pleased with the work that has taken place to get the migration ahead of deadline."

Seventeen departments have been included in a confidential version of the service, called xGSi. Some civil servants who require top secret data have been allocated virtual communities to work in, based on what they are authorised to view.

The GSi's Swaffer said the fail-over mechanism has also been upgraded: "The trade off comes with security and convenience but there is now a desire to join up government for more efficiency. With an ISP you can't guarantee availability - when something like 7/7 happens, things tend to collapse. But this is a separate 'private' internet."

The second phase of the project, which will include identity and access management tools, is expected to launch in September. According to Energis, human resources officers will be responsible for updating staff directories, which will assess who is entitled to access information.

The government will also attempt to link up local government offices to the service. Scotland has already implemented GSx, the cross governmental intranet, between the central administration, the DVLA, TV licensing and Registry Offices.

The CSIA, an information security arm of the Home Office, has given the first phase of the project a green light.