City of Saraland

Background

Saraland, a rapidly growing community just north of Mobile, Alabama, is experiencing significant expansion driven by residential and commercial development. Distinct from the larger Mobile city government, Saraland's municipality independently manages various critical facilities, including City Hall, more than a dozen public parks, recreational centers, a police station, two fire stations, and other essential municipal services. The city employs approximately 200 personnel, with a substantial portion dedicated to emergency response services.

Previously, Saraland relied on Cisco Meraki managed services provided by a MSP. While functional, the managed services model led to escalating recurring fees, restrictive equipment leasing agreements, and inflexible cloud-dependent network management. These factors significantly inflated costs and limited operational flexibility, particularly problematic for a rapidly growing municipality.

Frank Davis, Saraland’s first IT Director, recognized the need for a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solution. With previous experience managing Meraki and UniFi networks for Saraland City Schools, Davis saw UniFi as an optimal choice.

Organizational Requirements

Saraland clearly defined its requirements for a new network infrastructure:

1. Significant Cost Reduction

• Eliminate recurring Meraki license fees and expensive managed service costs.
• Achieve predictable, stable costs to optimize municipal budgeting.

2. Centralized Management & Scalability

• Simplified management across numerous geographically distributed municipal locations.
• Rapid scalability to support anticipated city growth.

3. Reliability and Continuity

• Maintain continuous uptime for essential city services, particularly emergency response departments (police/fire) and municipal court operations.
• Robust redundancy to handle frequent adverse weather conditions common to the region.

Why UniFi

UniFi directly addressed Saraland’s key requirements through its unique benefits:

• License-Free Model: Eliminating licensing fees immediately delivered substantial financial savings compared to Meraki.
• Unified Network Management: UniFi’s centralized management platform simplified oversight, updates, and troubleshooting across all municipal sites.
• Operational Continuity: Offline management capabilities ensured reliability and operational continuity independent of cloud connectivity.

Simplified Deployment

UniFi's straightforward deployment process and standardized hardware stack simplified network infrastructure across Saraland’s numerous facilities:

Technology Stack:

City Hall:

City Hall operates as the central network hub, deploying dual EFGs for redundancy, UniFi Aggregation switches for efficient inter-switch connectivity, and UniFi Enterprise switches and APs. This robust infrastructure ensures continuous uptime for critical municipal operations, including the municipal court and administrative offices.

Distributed Municipal Facilities:

Other municipal sites—including the animal shelter, numerous parks, recreational centers, the police station, and fire stations—followed this standardized deployment strategy. Each site received an EFG, UniFi Enterprise PoE switches, and U7 Max APs, ensuring seamless integration, simple scalability, and uniform management across the city.

SD-WAN for the City of Saraland

UniFi’s SD-WAN technology was pivotal in cost-effectively and securely connecting Saraland’s distributed municipal sites. Leveraging existing personal and business-class internet connections, Saraland avoided expensive leased fiber connections, dramatically reducing operational costs.

While Saraland utilizes Microsoft Entra for user authentication and MDM solutions for managing Apple devices independently of SD-WAN, several key applications remain centrally hosted at City Hall. UniFi’s SD-WAN capabilities provide secure, redundant paths back to these central resources, improving reliability and security. For instance, a fire station can simultaneously utilize fiber and cellular internet connections, connecting securely back to City Hall’s primary fiber connection or backup Starlink satellite internet. This redundancy ensures consistent access to critical municipal services.

UniFi’s Site Magic leverages a hub-and-spoke topology, establishing multiple redundant tunnels without additional licensing costs, ensuring exceptional reliability and scalability. Currently managing fewer than 20 municipal sites, UniFi’s SD-WAN positions Saraland perfectly for future growth, easily scaling to accommodate additional facilities as the city's infrastructure expands.

Single Pane of Glass Management

UniFi’s unified management platform greatly streamlined network administration across Saraland’s extensive municipal infrastructure. IT staff gained comprehensive visibility into network health, enabling rapid issue identification and resolution, and significantly reduced administrative overhead.

The centralized management allowed proactive network monitoring and simplified deployment of uniform configurations and updates citywide.

Enhanced Security with Cybersecure

Deploying UniFi Cybersecure enhanced the city’s network security posture, providing comprehensive protection through a simplified one-click implementation process. The solution incorporates advanced threat detection, intrusion prevention, and unified threat management without the complexity and cost traditionally associated with such robust security measures.

Conclusion

Transitioning to UniFi has positioned the city of Saraland to realize substantial operational and financial benefits, most notably a projected 400% reduction in annual network costs. The simplified deployment, centralized management, enhanced security, and robust connectivity offered by UniFi align perfectly with the city’s growth strategy.

As Saraland continues to expand, the municipality is well-prepared to scale its network infrastructure with UniFi, ensuring reliable connectivity and simplified management.