Florida-based R2 Unified Technologies is using Cisco technology to help the city of Weston just north of Miami become one of the premier smart cites in the USA.

Located about half an hour north of Miami in Florida’s Broward County, Weston, with a population of more than 70,000, has a unique structure to its local government being almost entirely outsourced.

The city’s technology infrastructure grew very organically since its inception in 1997 and it adopted its first Technology Strategic Plan in 2018. The plan provided a broad framework for the effective management of information technology in line with the city’s broader operational strategic goals.

Weston needed a partner that understood its goals, its core applications and the importance of building a strong foundation for the technology stack.

“If you do not build a strong infrastructure, you cannot expect to have stable and secure applications and services,” said Ryan Fernandes, the city’s director of technology. “R2 has helped us fortify our layers, year by year.”

The city was experiencing rapid growth, with users more than tripling in a short period. That meant the technology must be scalable. The underlying network, compute, storage and security aspects must be properly taken care of first. It also had to meet cyber-security needs as ransomware attacks posed a threat to municipalities. Weston had to be prepared for the worst.

R2 proposed several technologies to address these challenges starting with software defined access (SDA) powered by the Cisco DNA Center, Cisco StealthWatch security and Cisco’s ISE identity services engine.

ISE and SDA go hand in hand to validate authentication. ISE is an application that interrogates the device when a user connects to a network. It then sends that information to the SDA, which is the topology built to interact with, control and automate that authentication.

A major goal of the process was to adopt granular, user-based authentication as part of the SDA. A member of the marketing department working in City Hall one day could, ideally, go to work at the public works building the next day and have the exact same level of access they were used to. This would be the same whether workers were onsite at Weston municipal buildings, or if they were coming in over VPN while working remotely.

The fabric of SDA has two main components, the fabric border and the fabric edge. R2 deployed two Cisco Catalyst 9500 switches as fabric border nodes, which doubled as control plane nodes. The city’s then-existing core was a Cisco Nexus 5K, which was eventually replaced by a Cisco Fusion Router acting as a bridge between the fabric and non-fabric worlds.

Once that had been accomplished, border-to-fusion handoffs were configured and tested. One of the existing Catalyst 3850 switches was converted to a fabric edge switch. R2 followed up by installing and activating a fabric-enabled wireless controller, a Cisco WLC 5520. Access points were set up with fabric edge switches.

After the hardware had been deployed, all end-user devices – user desktops, IP phones, printers and other miscellaneous devices – were onboarded onto the fabric. Network connectivity was tested for wired and wireless users. The same exercises were performed for all the other fabric edges at remaining locations.

Following the completion of these tasks, R2 took on the responsibility of managing the SDA as well as providing further help when needed.

“R2 is always predicting where we can grow and fine-tune,” said Fernandes.

R2 was founded in 2008 out of the need to provide mid-market businesses with more skills and resources, and better service.