About Gloucester City Homes

Gloucester City Homes is an independent social landlord providing excellent housing management services to over 5,200 tenants. They own and manage around 4,500 rented homes, 501 sheltered housing properties, 270 leasehold properties, 25 commercial units and 21 homeless units.

They are recognised as one of the best housing providers in the country through independent accreditation, including the cabinet office Customer Service Excellence Standard. Gloucester City Homes has ambitious plans to invest in tenants homes, build new homes and create new job opportunities as a major employer in the city of Gloucester.

Solution 

As part of the engagement, Gloucester City Homes wanted to ensure its IT infrastructure refresh would result in better customer service standards. Since all services are delivered down a single piece of fibre, Gloucester City Homes has the flexibility to easily scale or adapt its infrastructure to meet its changing needs. In addition, Exponential-e provided managed service support and security assurance so that GCH didn't have to invest large amounts of resource in managing the system.

As part of becoming a digital-first organisation, Exponential-e provided GCH with Hosted Data Centre services, Server Replication to a second Data Centre as well as Managed Firewall, Infrastructure support. Exponential-e's super-fast 100 Gig Ethernet Network delivered the virtual desktop infrastructure that provides employees with access to a persistent, personal desktop from any device or location for all 120 staff.

In just a short space of time GCH has already seen the benefits that a secure and stable infrastructure delivers. Staff can now move from a desk to a meeting room to home and pick up their desktop in exactly the same state as they left it.

GCH recently underwent a programme where its 5,200 tenants needed to renew their tenancy agreements as part of its separation from the council. Previously this would have been a manual, paper-based process. However, the flexibility of the infrastructure has meant that GCH have been able to use a combination of mobile phones and laptops to run events that allow tenants to refresh their agreements from designated locations throughout the city, something that was more convenient for its tenants and enabled more efficient processing. Instead of tenants completing vast amounts of paperwork and staff entering this on to the system manually, the information could be processed immediately on-site.

Staff at GCH experienced a noticeable improvement to user-experience with quicker log-in and load times, as well faster processing time for data / screen refreshes. For the organisation, this brings significant productivity gains.

• Gloucester City Homes has enabled its employees to work in a more productive way; there has been an increase in the allowance of flexible working, primarily due to the solution provided by Exponential-e allowing employees to work on the same work applications from any location. This in turn leads to better satisfaction amongst the workforce and also improved customer service levels.
• The replication of server data to a second Data Centre means that Gloucester City Homes can rest assured they are protected in the event of a disaster. They can promptly and easily access their data from a secondary source and quickly get their business up and running again if the need arises.

 Challenges

Gloucester City Homes (GCH) has successfully transitioned from operating as an arm's length management organisation with all its ICT infrastructure and services being provided by the local council, to an independent body with complex backend demands controlling everything from renewing tenancy agreements to managing burst drains. The transition has given GCH independent control over housing assets and necessitated all tenants to sign new occupancy agreements.

The separation from the council gave GCH the opportunity to refresh their IT strategy and transfer to new IT infrastructure. They wanted a provider that could offer a diversity of provisioned services and ensure they continue improving customer service levels. In terms of previous support, they had an in-house team managing applications; but also used costly outsourced technical and support resources. A need to enable their staff to work remotely and from various locations, such as within the homes of tenants, also meant that they were looking for a provider that could deliver a remote desktop service and increase the productivity and flexibility of their employees.

About Carers Trust

Carers Trust is the largest charity working to support carers. They work to improve support, services and recognition for anyone living with the challenges of being an unpaid carer. They do this with their unique network of 116 independent carer's centres, 55 Crossroads Care schemes and 99 young carer's services.

This network of support is united by a shared vision to ensure that quality information, advice and support is available to all carers across the UK.

Solution 

With an increase in the number of remote workers, the Cloud solution recommended and implemented at Carers Trust needed to facilitate a number of business requirements. Alongside ensuring that remote workers could easily access the data and information on-demand, Carer's Trust were looking to virtualise their IT infrastructure to create even greater efficiencies.

A Fibre based WAN across the Carers Trust's five sites was implemented, inclusive of a VPLS core which linked all of the sites together. This Network included a 25Mb breakout to the Internet and a Managed Firewall, ensuring that the Network was secure and protected.

Across the Exponential-e secure and private Network they introduced a VoIP hosted service, which enabled the organisation to centralise their communications across all sites, meaning that calls could be transferred regardless of geographical location.

With a migration of IT services to Office 365 and the addition of Virtual Data Centre (VDC) services, Carers Trust was left with the bare minimum to manage and support on premise. This enabled their internal IT teams to focus on more strategic IT activities that will benefit the organisation and its future growth.

The introduction of Cloud based and virtualised services has enabled Carers Trust to be agile in the deployment of modifications to their Network and infrastructure, as well as flexible in terms of future growth.

1. With Exponential-e providing a managed service with regards to their data centres and firewall, Carers Trust was able to focus their limited IT support on the delivery of services internally. The organisation is also secure in the knowledge that their Network will be proactively monitored and can easily be managed, minimising the risk of a need to implement a disaster recovery plan in the event of a failover.
2. One of the major drivers for Carers Trust's IT project was to unite their multiple sites, particularly after the merger in 2012. This particular issue was resolved through the implementation of a 5-site WAN and hosted VoIP solution, ensuring that all employees, regardless of location, could easily communicate with each other and quickly share data and be governed by one central IT policy and an end-to-end SLA.
3. By taking Cloud based services from Exponential-e, Carers Trust has ensured that their IT infrastructure is protected, easier to manage and that there is unity across the organisation. They are enjoying the benefit of having one single supplier that has created resource, time and cost efficiencies.

 Challenges

A merger in 2012 was the primary reason for Carers Trust to look to transform their IT service provision, including the implementation of the latest Cloud based technologies and solutions.

Ensuring unity across the organisation and its employees, whilst ensuring that their infrastructure was current and fit for purpose, was vital to the success of the merger. A priority was also to ensure that employees were able to productively collaborate with each other, across the organisation, as easily as possible.

An additional requirement was the need to incorporate two more sites to the Carers Trust Network - primarily as a number of their support functions, including Finance and Commercial, were relocating to these offices to reduce operating costs.

However, with a limited IT team available internally there was a significant amount of work that needed to be done by an external service provider to ensure that the organisations core infrastructure, framework and services were modernised and managed suitably.

With a number of existing suppliers providing a variety of different Network and Telecommunications services, the organisation wanted to streamline and rationalise services by selecting one service provider that could provide all their IT infrastructure requirements. This is where Exponential-e came in.

With the ability to provide the Network, Cloud and Unified Communications services that Carers Trust needed to ensure their organisation could successfully function after the merger, Exponential-e were selected as the chosen service provider.

Solution benefits

• Internal IT resource can now be channelled into delivering IT Services thanks to virtualisation.
• Managed firewall ensures that their Network is kept secure and private.
• IT infrastructure is supported and protected by the Exponential-e 24 x 7 / 365 service desk.
• Utilisation of VDC services so that data and services are protected against onsite disaster.
• Introduction of a WAN ensured that sites could seamlessly and efficiently connect and communicate.