Case Study: Gloucester City Homes

Migrating core services to the cloud three months ahead of schedule.

What we did

IT as a Service (ITaaS) provider Fordway designed and implemented a managed cloud solution for GCH’s legacy applications, enabling the organisation to benefit from cloud’s flexibility and scalability.

Categories

DaaS
Cloud

Gloucester City Homes
Gloucester City Homes

The Challenge

Increasingly dissatisfied with its incumbent IT service provision, which was constraining development and growth, housing association GCH was looking for a flexible, cost-effective alternative.

As Paul Haines, Head of IT, Gloucester City Homes, explains, “We weren’t happy with the level of service we’d been receiving, and reliability and flexibility were poor, so we wanted to take back control. At first, we moved our services into a public cloud where possible, using Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, but our old legacy applications didn’t play well with others in the cloud.”

We wanted to take back control and improve flexibility and reliability while reducing costs. I’m happy to say that the results have turned out extremely well.” Paul and his team moved services into the public cloud where possible, using Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure.

However, as Paul points out: “Our old legacy applications don’t play well with others and in the cloud.” So GCH issued a tender on the Technology Services (TS2) framework to host and manage other aspects of its IT estate. After evaluating the responses, GCH chose ITaaS provider Fordway to implement a managed Cloud service, initially provided from Fordway’s private cloud, the entire environment has now been migrated to Azure.

 

 

The Solution

IT as a Service (ITaaS) provider Fordway designed and implemented a managed cloud solution for GCH’s legacy applications, enabling the organisation to benefit from cloud’s flexibility and scalability. Initially these services were fully managed and secured in Fordway’s data centre.

The migration was delivered three months ahead of schedule, enabling GCH to further reduce its costs. It is a not-for-profit organisation, so any money not spent on IT will be used for social good, such as building new housing and helping people who have become homeless.

More recently the entire environment, including the core Orchard Housing Management application which is key to their operations has been migrated into Azure, with the previous Citrix virtual desktops migrated to Azure Virtual Desktop for all user access to the environment.

GCH is continuing to implement its new IT strategy and is talking to
Fordway about how they can provide further assistance and support as GCH continues its digital transformation journey.

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“We were looking for a supplier of a similar size to us, who would focus on service and solutions. Fordway seemed to tick all of those boxes. Their proposal was relatively similar to others we recieved but there were two key differences. Their pricing was competitive – they clearly run an efficient ship – and they offered a better level of service, with the ability to speak directly to someone who knew what they were doing and could answer our questions.”

Paul Haines – Head of IT, Gloucester City Homes