York College launches degree in cyber security  |  Case Study

|   THE CLIENT

York University

Half of all UK businesses have a cyber security skills gap.  York College has stepped up to change that, by launching a foundation degree in digital technologies with cyber security.  Developed in collaboration with boxxe, the degree – the first of its kind in the UK – started in September 2020.

Students made use of a new cyber security lab, designed and configured by boxxe.  Course Tutor Richard Hind said: “Research published by the UK National Cybersecurity Centre suggests that more than half of UK businesses have a cyber security skills gap, while other figures reveal that over 70% of large UK companies have been the victim of a cyberattack over the past 12 months.  It is thought the cyber security job market will continue to grow throughout the 2020s.  So this is the perfect time to start developing a career in this rapidly expanding industry.” 

boxxe has provided the Ministry of Defence with security solutions for the last 30 years.  CEO Phil Doye, said: “Our mission with the boxxe community is to make technology human – that is, to help every individual and organisation to recognise and fulfill their potential through the use of technology.  The work we have done with York College, and the result of that work – the first foundation degree in digital technologies with cyber security in the UK – is a huge stepping stone towards addressing a national skills shortage and nurturing future talent.” 

York College offers a Foundation Degree in Cyber Security course.  For people already in employment who are looking for a part-time route to a qualification in cyber security, York College offers the BCS Level-4 Apprenticeship – Cyber Security Technologist. 

 |   THE CHALLENGE

Analogue working

Every one of Thirteen's properties has a substantial amount of associated documents.  Thirteen's agents need fast access to these documents to deliver an outstanding customer experience, so they must be stored and managed efficiently.  But that wasn't happening consistently.

Thirteen's property management process was mostly analogue, relying on agents manually processing paper document and individually importing them into an SQL database.  This caused two problems:

With their legacy document management system reaching end-of-life support, Thirteen recognised an opportunity to save time and costs by working more efficiently.  As digital transformation specialists and a trusted technology partner to Thirteen Group for years, we were thrilled to help them with this project.

After starting, Thirteen quickly found that 75,000 documents had been mislabelled in the legacy database.  Missing essential information, they couldn't transfer these documents into the new SharePoint system.  The only solution was to update each document manually.  Although it would only take 2 minutes to update each record with a correct label, this would add up to 300+ full working days to fix completely.

To solve the issue, our Workplace Solutions Expert built a custom automation workflow.  Through Robotic Process Automation, this bot pulls every item of information needed to correctly label each document and places it next to each record to speed up the process.