Technical expertise

Mobile communications are increasing in importance in achieving business objectives, be that for public-safety organisations where mission-critical communications demand highly available and secure mobile radio networks; across government where wireless technology extends the reach of the information society; or within enterprises where mobile services underpin business mobility. Here at Mason, our wireless expertise includes network design, incorporating in-house RF planning using state-of-the-art planning tools; spectrum strategy and planning to determine optimum requirements; and industry leading advice and assurance with respect to the best technology choices for your business based on many years of working with legacy and leading-edge technologies. Our experience includes:

• mobile communications – 2G (GSM/GPRS), 3G (UMTS HSPA) and 4G (WiMAX, LTE)
• professional mobile radio for mission and business-critical applications (including TETRA)
• satellite communications
• microwave
• mobile carrier devices and applications
• mobile data and workforce applications
• remote control, telemetry and SCADA.

Mason remains an active participant across a range of global industry bodies and standards forums, including ETSI and the TETRA Association. Such involvement ensures that we remain at the leading edge of wireless technology, understanding the capability and challenges not only for current products and services – and the applications that they support – but also future mobile radio developments.

Information technology (IT)  is the lifeblood of modern business, with powerful software processing on the desktop PC, on the handheld device, and back in the server room, allowing staff to work more effectively and enabling business processes to operate more efficiently. These services must be delivered in a manner that is efficient in cost and easy to manage, while delivering an effective return on investment.

Mason offers a deep and experienced technical team capable of applying our SPEAR consulting lifecycle to our clients' IT challenges. Some particular examples of our technical expertise include:

• Data centres and server rooms — best practices in design and implementation, understanding the initial and whole-life cost balances of building, power, cooling and computing, and how to evaluate, improve or migrate legacy facilities
• Cloud computing and hosted services — the benefits of having off-site information technology solutions, how the risks associated with access, security and data governance can be managed, and how to avoid "vendor lock-in" with cloud services
• Virtualisation and thin-client — the business case for virtualisation of servers and/or desktops, with the real-world benefits and how these can be truly realised from a service delivery, energy reduction and management overhead perspective
• Convergent applications and integration – how communications services such as voice, video and collaboration can be delivered as information technology solutions, and how the integration opportunities with services such as email, the web and the desktop can promote new ways of working and differentiate this approach from a basic replication of more traditional, non-integrated communications offerings.

In all of Mason's work in IT, the team's technical skills in information security and network communications are applied to provide a comprehensive consulting service.

Managing, reviewing, developing, migrating and transforming networks for voice, data and unified solutions is a continual challenge for businesses to allow them to optimise effective business and customer contact. The Mason consulting team offers pragmatic advice to help review and select the right blend of data networks, voice and unified communications solutions and services required to deliver modern business needs. Under the SPEAR consulting lifecycle, we can deliver our technical expertise and years of experience at the heart of the telecommunications industry to provide our clients with valuable, independent advice on matters such as:

• next generation networks and broadband – differentiation between hype and reality in understanding the developments in new network services from a technical and financial perspective
• public-sector networks – how collaborative network services are developing across the country, the services they can offer to organisations, and how to ensure that each participant's requirements are reflected in the solutions being implemented
• voice services and IP telephony – understanding the supplier technical roadmaps form traditional PBX services to newer IP platforms, the consideration of self-service versus hosted voice platforms, building the business case and timescales for migration to IP voice services, and identifying the opportunities and benefits to integrate new solutions into a converged communications infrastructure
• collaboration and conferencing –reviewing the market for different collaboration platforms, the benefits of desktop audio and videoconferencing versus whole-room high-end solutions, ensuring that investment benefit is realised by monitoring adoption of conferencing within an organisation, and taking collaboration to the next level by implementing presence, messaging and mobility solutions
• audit and billing – realising best value from the network infrastructure by ensuring that billing and management are effective and accurate, maintaining effective asset reconciliation against bills, reviewing usage against tariff models to ensure that the best contractual arrangements are in place for an organisation.

Businesses, government agencies and service organisations all rely on storing and distributing information using ICT solutions and telecoms networks. This information includes sensitive records about personnel and customers, commercially confidential data, and sensitive business plans.

New threats are continually identified, and with the growing reliance on electronic information exchange, e-commerce, mobile and remote working, and electronically controlled critical infrastructure, organisations need to ensure that they have deployed the appropriate security controls to protect their business assets. These controls must be balanced and appropriate to the organisation, enabling staff to work securely and efficiently, and ensure its business objectives are met. Further, to ensure continuity of operations under conditions of organisational, market or environmental stress then business continuity planning and disaster recovery are imperatives.

"Employees are the real perimeter of the organisation's network ... Protecting organisations begins with making sure employees understand their roles and responsibilities in safeguarding sensitive data and protecting company resources." ¹

High-profile security breaches affecting both the public sector and enterprise organisations demonstrate how important it is to understand the potential threats to all aspects of an organisation, including their service providers and supply chain. Only by gaining this understanding can the appropriate resources be assigned to address the risks or vulnerabilities to which the organisation is exposed.

Mason offers a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio of information assurance and security services to help clients manage security risks across their operations. We are a trusted partner to some of the world's largest and most influential organisations across the public and private sectors.

Virtually every organisation is now obliged to assess its security risk and ensure that adequate risk management is undertaken, both to meet its corporate governance obligations and to ensure appropriate compliance. In this increasingly competitive and global market, it is critical that organisations implement information security best practice to differentiate themselves. Mason can help clients to improve individual elements within a project or we can help to implement and manage an entire risk management framework. 

^{1 [Source] ENISA, July 2009}

Effective interaction with both the public and members of staff is vital across the public and private sectors – and ICT technology has an important role in facilitating such interaction. Our control room and contact centre expertise covers both public and private sectors, with experience in the emergency services sector for both mission-critical emergency (112/999) and non-emergency calls that is second to none. With the importance of the work undertaken within the control room environment, they require reliable and modern command and control systems that are effectively integrated into one overall solution, as well as new technology that enables control rooms to communicate and control external resources. At Mason, we have been involved from strategy through procurement, implementation, integration, test and acceptance, and post-implementation reviews for the complete range of technologies including:

• command and control/computer-aided dispatch (CAD)/mobilising and resource management systems
• graphical information systems
• integrated communication control systems (ICCS)
• telephony solutions including PBX, IPT and VoIP.

Sitting at the heart of enterprise operations, there is a host of external applications, both externally facing and supporting back-office functionality, to consider, such as: 

As well as understanding the technology that underpins control rooms and contact centres, Mason has experience in understanding the business logic and processes that drive resourcing and overall efficiency – essential skills to map the operational imperatives to actual technology implementation.