PMGC and Navisite were selected following a formal tender process for their strong value-for-money proposition, as well as the flexibility and scalability of their solution. Nearly 500 users were migrated to the cloud environments, including roles, access rights and over 1 Terabyte (TB) of data.
BCHA develops services that help bring together housing, health and social care in order to deliver support to society’s most in-need. Prior to reviewing its IT systems, the organisation was using legacy versions of software and carrying out their important work through on-premise servers. After a careful review process, BCHA selected PMGC and Navisite’s cloud hosting, IaaS and DaaS solutions to meet the key objectives of reducing system downtime and increasing the reliability and speed of access to IT services. With PMGC’s help, BCHA’s network infrastructure was moved to an environment that supports roaming use with centralised profiles and file redirection.
Since moving network infrastructure, and IT infrastructure and desktop environments to the cloud, system downtime has been vastly reduced and BCHA employees are able to quickly connect to applications and data – achieving a reduction in access rate time of approximately 80 per cent, compared to the previous system. This reduction in time, facilitated by having both their cloud hosting and DaaS environments in the same high quality Navisite data centre facility, allows staff to spend more of their working day to help address real client needs. The migration also involved upgrading and re-implementing BCHA’s full suite of both traditional and bespoke applications.
Although based in Bournemouth, the Housing Association delivers services across the South West region of the UK, from Plymouth to Reading – with a large portion of its staff often working remotely. One of the organisation’s big challenges was providing a consistent IT service, with the same functionality and access to data across offices for all members of staff. With Navisite’s IaaS and DaaS solution, every employee can easily access a full, new range of business applications and their own data from any location, on any device. Dealing with sensitive customer data is now also made easier and more secure by hosting in Navisite’s tier III data centre facilities instead of hosting on premise.
Michelle Embling, Business Improvement & Project Manager at BCHA, said: “In order to deliver value-for-money services and compete in today’s increasingly challenging financial climate, BCHA recognised the need and requirement to further invest in a modern IT infrastructure. The development of a partnership with PGMC and Navisite has enabled us to undertake our biggest IT investment of the past 20 years. Our new systems have resulted in very positive user feedback, with improved staff motivation and customer focus. Efficient and effective systems, have now enabled us to engage fully with new and emerging procurement opportunities. We now have an integrated and efficient system which fully supports and complements our work.”
Shez Cheema, Chief Executive Officer at PMGC said: “It’s important for us at PMGC to truly partner and work closely together with our customers. By moving past a reactive approach, to being proactive in our service delivery for BCHA, we have helped make this a smooth cloud migration. Usually, this type of IaaS and DaaS offering would only be available to enterprise-scale organisations, but Navisite’s solution, together with our added-value services, makes this technology available to a much broader range of organisations, such as BCHA. This implementation has helped BCHA be more cost-effective and to lower the total cost of ownership for its IT services. These results were achievable by the team adopting an agile approach to the project, with clear definition of tasks and responsibilities.”
