About Conisbee

Operating from offices in London, Norwich, and Cambridge, Conisbee offers structural and civil engineering solutions that have supported the creation of numerous award-winning buildings – ranging from simple refurbishments to the most complex new builds – across the UK and internationally.

Challenges

Like other forward-thinking firms across the AEC sector, Conisbee have embraced the journey to the Cloud in order to optimise the overall flexibility, security, and resilience of their IT infrastructure. This journey took place in parallel with an expansion into a number of smaller regional offices, and the gradual phasing out of legacy systems, which presented additional challenges when it came to enabling seamless cross-site collaboration between teams and their clients, considering the scale and complexity of typical architectural models.

In order to manage these challenges and create an IT infrastructure that would support their ongoing growth and provide the ability to pivot in response to changes in the digital landscape, Conisbee selected Exponential-e as their Cloud and connectivity partner.

Solution 

The inherent flexibility of this new infrastructure was proven in the early months of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced firms across the country to begin working remotely, in line with social distancing regulations.
Conisbee's Cloud journey continues, with the support of their Exponential-e account team. This will support effective hybrid working in the post-COVID landscape, with staff able to communicate and collaborate remotely, in the office, or on the move, accessing the critical platforms they depend on through a range of devices, with zero compromises in terms of either security or performance.

In this way, Conisbee's partnership demonstrates the value a well-considered digital transformation strategy, supported by a trusted technology partner, can bring to the AEC sector as a whole, allowing for tangible cost savings, more flexible working, and the successful delivery of the most innovative, sustainable, and enjoyable buildings.

About Glen Howells Architects

Launching in 1990, Glenn Howells Architects is a leading UK architectural design studio, with a 140‐ strong creative team delivering innovative projects from offices in both London and Birmingham - all driven by the belief that our physical spaces can make a tangible difference in the lives of both individuals and communities.

Challenges

Like all companies within the architectural sector, Glenn Howells Architects depend on close collaboration between team members to deliver innovative designs that draw on the full scope of their creativity. While their legacy voice system, supplemented with multiple UC platforms, had proven adequate in this regard for some time, the onset of COVID‐19, and the resulting move to remote working, meant that the system was being utilised at a scale that had never been tried before. The system quickly revealed its limitations in this regard, having no softphone capabilities outside of the company VPN, and lacking the capacity to manage the number of team members now connecting to the corporate network via personal devices each day.

Having already established a strong working relationship with Exponential‐e over the years, they were selected as the technology partner to propose and deliver a solution in response to these challenges, ensuring the deployment would be achieved with minimal disruption and ensure the entire creative team could adapt to the new working model straight away.

Solution 

Following a detailed analysis of their requirements, budget, and existing infrastructure, Microsoft Teams Calling, delivered through an as-a-Service model, proved a perfect fit for Glen Howells Architects' immediate and long-term needs.

As a Cloud-based solution, TCaaS was deployed rapidly across their infrastructure, under the supervision of a dedicated project team, who remained in regular contact before and after the deployment process to ensure its success and ensure any concerns could be swiftly resolved.

The project team were very informative, efficient, and successfully delivered a working solution to the agreed timeline. As a client, I felt I had no complaints about the delivery of the solution and support providing during and after the implementation.

Dharminder Grewal, IT Manager - Glen Howells Architects. 

This hands-on support meant that uptake of the new solution across Glen Howells Architects' creative team was achieved extremely quickly, to the extent Teams became their default tool for remote collaboration between both colleagues and clients, completely replacing the previous, disparate selection of UC solutions.

The success of this deployment helped Glen Howells maintain their dynamic creative processes and customer engagement throughout the lockdowns of 2020, while simultaneously enhancing their future agility and scalability, and strengthening their working relationship with Exponential-e. Plans are already in place for further solutions to be integrated into Glen Howells Architects' IT infrastructure, in order to build on these successes.

About Leeds Teaching Hospitals

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is part of the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) - a partnership between six hospital trusts across West Yorkshire and Harrogate that deliver acute services, combining their collective experience, expertise and resources to deliver the very highest standard of patient care across the entire region.

Challenges

With a high daily throughput of patients, staff and products, efficiency, scalability, and operational resilience are of vital importance for the hospital trusts that make up the WYAAT. In 2018, Leeds Teaching Hospitals prepared a business case for collaborative supply chain management, driven by a full transformation of the legacy IT infrastructure.

Building on the success of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) Scan4Safety programme, this change would allow for automated data capture at every point of the patient journey, storing patient records and details of any supplies ordered and utilised in the Cloud, allowing for staff to track their efficacy and ensure only the best equipment is utilised, for the best available price. In this way, paper-based processes would give way to a cutting-edge IT infrastructure that would support real-time communication and collaboration across all sites and streamline the process of ordering medical supplies, with all electronic health records updated in real-time, and expediting the recall and reorder processes. This would not only enhance patient outcomes across the entire network and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, but also provide WYAAT with full control and visibility of its supply chain, for improved quality and cost control.

Such processes are typically quite time-consuming with traditional paper-based record keeping, but the scalability and flexibility of the Cloud would ensure this critical data could be kept secure, in line with all applicable healthcare regulations, while still providing actionable insights across all six sites – insights that could then be used to drive higher standards of care across the entire UK.

However, to achieve this, high-performance connectivity between all six WYAAT sites and their supply chain provider was vital, which meant the search began for a technology partner who could support a full-scale digital transformation, with Leeds Teaching Hospitals leading the initiative.

Solution 

Leeds Teaching Hospitals engaged with Exponential-e to provide support for the entire WYAAT, due to a number of factors, including compliance with GDPR and HSCN requirements, and the ability to ensure a swift deployment, with zero disruption to patient care and administrative operations, thanks to previous experience executing similar deployments across the UK healthcare sector.

At the outset of the project, a dedicated account team at Exponential-e connected with internal IT teams at all six WYAAT trusts, and their US-based supply chain provider, establishing a project plan that would involve all parties concerned in order to ensure an efficient, stress-free deployment. Given the complexity of the desired solution, three-way communication has proven essential to the success of this project and led to a strong rapport developing between teams across each region, with regular communication helping drive the desired outcomes.

All six WYAAT sites were connected to a single server farm, consisting of four servers with full replication, to ensure operational resilience. Throughout this deployment process, Exponential-e conducted intensive testing, to ensure the resulting infrastructure will provide fully consistent, reliable performance across all sites, reviewing the findings with the WYAAT's own teams to identify opportunities for further growth and improvement.

About North Star

Born in 2006 from the merger of the Endeavour and Teesdale housing associations, North Star is a forward-thinking housing association that not only builds affordable homes across the North of England, but helps create strong communities and personal connections wherever they operate, driving and taking part in numerous initiatives to make a lasting, positive difference in people's lives.

Challenges

In 2016, North Star was preparing to welcome the Darlington Housing Association into its group. As the plans for this merger were put into place, it became clear that the complex legacy IT infrastructure was rapidly approaching the end of its lifecycle, and as a result, potential ways to future-proof and optimise it were presented for consideration.

In particular, with the increasing complexity of legal and compliance obligations, combined with an evolving cyber threat landscape, maintaining robust security and data protection was a key priority. Furthermore, while they had a Virtual Desktop solution in place, it had proven both slow and difficult to manage, which limited staff's options with regards to remote working and omnichannel communication with colleagues and residents.

In light of these concerns, and in order to bring the IT infrastructure back in line with their long-term business goals, North Star seized the opportunity to modernise their entire IT infrastructure, for which they engaged with Exponential-e.

Solution 

Following a detailed review of North Star's goals, requirements and existing infrastructure, a full-scale Cloud migration was conducted, with the entire legacy infrastructure moved to a UK-based Virtual Data Centre, and full server replication to a second VDC, also hosted in the UK. This controlled migration process was managed by a dedicated account team from Exponential-e, ensuring the transformation was completed on time, to budget, and with minimal disruption to daily operations.

All eight North Star sites were connected with a high-performance WAN, ensuring consistent performance of the new Virtual Desktop for all teams, and - in turn - enhancing communication and collaboration.

The existing Virtual Desktop solution was completely replaced with Citrix Virtual Desktops, delivered as a fully managed service to ensure North Star's staff could begin making use of the solution's full capabilities as quickly as possible, and that any initial and future issues could be swiftly identified and resolved, without creating an unnecessary drain on internal IT teams' time and resources.

The managed services model was extended to the security ecosystem, with Exponential-e providing hands-on monitoring and drawing on cutting-edge threat intelligence to ensure the latest cyber threats could be pre-emptively dealt with and any potential weaknesses in the infrastructure could be resolved before they were exploited.

Throughout lockdown, with staff forced to work remotely, the new infrastructure proved invaluable, allowing staff and residents to remain in close contact through a range of channels, including voice, telephony, online chat, and email, with consistently high quality throughout. This not only allowed staff to remain as close to 'business as usual' as possible, but allowed residents to continue accessing essential services as easily as possible, with Exponential-e's monitoring of the infrastructure freeing staff to focus on first-class service delivery and quick resolutions.

The success of this migration represents the first steppingstone towards North Star's planned Cloud-first strategy, with a fully virtualised infrastructure providing the agility needed to effectively respond to unexpected changes in the digital landscape and the evolving needs of their residents.

About NHS Digital

NHS Digital is the entire UK health and social care system's trusted information and technology partner, utilising innovative solutions to enhance patient care, open new channels of communication, and optimise operational efficiency.

The Challenge

Solution 

After being introduced to Exponential-e via referral, NHS Digital engaged with them to support their Cloud Connect requirements, providing diverse and resilient connectivity to AWS and Azure public clouds. To manage this initial deployment, a dedicated account team was assigned at Exponential-e, working closely with NHS Digital's own IT teams to ensure the success of the project, provide hands-on support and guidance whenever needed, and enable the design and delivery of bespoke solutions, as required.

Since then, the partnership has continued to evolve, with 2018 seeing NHS Digital begin the deployment of Exponential-e's SD-WAN solution, in order to overcome their connectivity challenges in a changing digital landscape. Following its successful launch, this solution provided NHS Digital's IT teams with maximum control and visibility of their cross-site connectivity, while automating all data encryption and protection processes, removing the resulting drain on internal IT teams' time. The combination of intelligent automation with a 'single pane of glass' view of the entire network and security ecosystem allows NHS Digital Teams to manage traffic by application and by user, ensuring all staff have access to the tools and information they need, wherever they are working from, with consistent performance across all regions and encryption of sensitive data available with a single click via the portal.

The strong rapport that has developed between NHS Digital and their Exponential-e account team since the initial Cloud Connect deployment - along with the inherent flexibility and scalability of the IT infrastructure - helped ensure a smooth transition to remote working for staff in response to COVID-19. Operational efficiency and patient care could be maintained across all regions, with proactive monitoring from Exponential-e's 24 / 7 support team, ensuring any potential issues or security risks could be swiftly detected and resolved.

Entering 2021, the Leeds Government Hub was successfully launched, in line with Government-led initiatives, with high-capacity connectivity delivered by Exponential-e. This provided more than 3,000 staff with the means to maintain operational efficiency and cost control, while NHS Digital and Exponential-e teams continue working closely together to identify any additional opportunities to achieve new cost savings and performance improvements, including the delivery of bespoke solutions, tailored to NHS Digital's unique requirements.

The ongoing success of this partnership paints a clear picture of what can be achieved within the healthcare sector when internal IT teams combine their expertise with that of trusted partners, who are deeply invested in the success of the sector and the different ways in which technological innovations can enhance both operational efficiencies and patient care, across the entire UK.

About Tandem Money

Tandem is 'The Good Green Bank', a fully regulated digital app‐based bank founded on the idea of putting customers' needs first whilst helping them save more than just their money by pushing for a sustainable future. The acquisition of green lender Allium in 2020, an established green homes lender, accelerated Tandem's mission into the green space. Tandem offers savings, mortgages, and loans to help customers green their properties, and eventually their lives.

Challenges

The key driver behind Tandem's ongoing digital transformation was earning a full banking license in 2018 - something that had been a core focus of their infrastructure's evolution. This meant their infrastructure would need to fulfil all legal and compliance obligations around the handling of financial data, and also demonstrate the highest standard of operational resilience.

At the time, Tandem's IT and telephony infrastructure was hosted at various separate data centres, while their banking application was hosted on AWS services, and a separate site set aside for workplace recovery. Although multiple sites were involved here, the whole network depended on the London office, creating a single point of failure.

After a comprehensive evaluation of various suppliers, Tandem engaged with Exponential‐e to ensure these critical elements could be securely interconnected in order to maximise performance and scalability and ensure all requirements for full bank status were achieved. Exponential‐e's deep experience in the financial sector was critical here, providing Tandem with complete confidence that the partnership would provide a positive contribution to their journey.

Solution 

The networking solution delivered by Exponential‐e interconnected all Tandem sites via a high-performance WAN - a fully managed low‐latency solution that ensured consistent performance across all sites. This was implemented by a dedicated Exponential‐e account team, who project managed every stage of the deployment to ensure there would be no service disruption and that Tandem's long-term goals remained the primary focus throughout the deployment and beyond.

Critically, this fulfilled all compliance requirements regarding the handling and storage of financial data, while ensuring Tandem's teams would have the right tools at their fingertips at all times. To ensure a disruption free migration process, secure connections were created between Exponential-e's self‐owned network and Tandem's AWS services, allowing for a successful consolidation of the different elements of their infrastructure, and providing IT teams with a higher level of control and visibility.

As the partnership between Tandem and Exponential‐e evolved, a combination of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Office 365 was established as the ideal combination of solutions to further optimise Tandem's overall efficiency and enable effortless collaboration between their various teams, regardless of where they were located, with security policies applied automatically and role‐based segregation opening up a wide range of opportunities for remote working.

Throughout 2020, when the COVID‐19 pandemic forced organisations worldwide to rapidly transition to a remote workforce, the inherent flexibility and scalability of Tandem's infrastructure and a robust business continuity plan showed its true worth, as the entire workforce were able to begin working remotely with minimal disruption to day‐to‐day operations, and no compromise in terms of security and compliance. This option had already been utilised on an ad‐hoc basis by Tandem's engineers, but a scenario where it would need to be utilised on a company‐wide basis had been considered and factored into the business continuity plan, with tests taking place to ensure such measures would be viable, should they ever be needed.

In this way, Tandem has demonstrated how the right infrastructure, with the support of the right technology partner, provides organisations in even the most challenging sectors with the agility to pivot in response to unexpected, large‐scale shifts in the digital landscape. Tandem's long‐term digital transformation continues, with plans in place to bring its core banking suite in house and into the Cloud, for a further layer of control and flexibility.

About Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic was founded by entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson in 1984 with innovation and customer service at its core. Virgin Atlantic and its holiday business, Virgin Atlantic Holidays, employs over 5,700 people worldwide, serving 27 destinations across four continents. With a company culture that emphasises the importance of strong personal connections, a thriving partner ecosystem is essential to the continual development of Virgin Atlantic's technology infrastructure.

Challenges

In early 2017, Virgin Atlantic began the retender process for its technology network services. This was with a view to identifying opportunities for improvement, cost saving and new technologies, while simultaneously planning on simplifying and consolidating infrastructure with Virgin Atlantic Holidays. Exponential‐e had already acted as a technology supplier to Virgin Atlantic Holidays for several years, providing a range of services including data centre hosting and UK‐wide connectivity. Following this, the business was invited to tender for a series of network services including WAN, network security, WAN management and managed switching, with the aim of providing high‐performance, secure, and resilient infrastructure.

Beyond the stringent technical requirements, the tender process was focused on identifying technology partners who would be a good cultural fit with Virgin Atlantic. Both businesses share fundamental values of partnership, agility, an aligned approach to engagement and a drive to innovate. As an organisation that prides itself on creating deeply personal connections, Virgin Atlantic was keen to identify partners that would help drive the ongoing evolution of their infrastructure, rather than simply a transactional service provider.

Solution 

Following an extensive tender process, Exponential‐e were selected as one of the key technology network partners in Virgin Atlantic's network transformation and infrastructure merger.

The partnership proved a strong foundation for future growth, as shown in 2018, when a range of new services were deployed. These included tools for more reliable global remote access, which Exponential‐e successfully delivered in a matter of weeks. This proved invaluable throughout 2020, when the onset of COVID‐19 forced a move to remote working for much of Virgin Atlantic's workforce. This work was essential in helping office‐based staff to quickly adapt to new ways of working with minimal disruption.

We continue to build on these successes, allowing Virgin Atlantic people and partners to access the tools they need from anywhere. Zero compromise in security, performance and compliance underpins all work undertaken for the airline. The partnership between Exponential‐e and Virgin Atlantic highlights the value of collaboration, creativity and mutual trust when navigating an evolving digital landscape.

About Cottsway Housing

Operating across West Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, Cottsway Housing provides and maintains rental and shared ownership properties for more than 10,000 tenants, from single-person flats to family homes.

Challenges

As a company that emphasises the importance of openness and engagement between staff and tenants, Cottsway has always relied on its internal and external telecommunications solutions. However, their legacy PBX phone system, hosted on-site, eventually became challenging and time-consuming to manage. Concerns over this single point of failure were compounded by the difficulty of simultaneously managing Microsoft Teams for internal use. This combination of legacy systems and disparate platforms meant actionable analytics were difficult to achieve, thanks to a lack of oversight of all channels of communication.

Solution 

Exponential-e proposed, designed and delivered a completely new communications ecosystem for Cottsway, utilising Direct Routing with Microsoft Teams, combined with resilient SIP trunking for external calls. This unified solution successfully consolidated Cottsway's telecommunications ecosystem while providing a range of additional tools for both internal and external communications. At the same time, to answer the ongoing need for effective analytics and reporting, Exponential-e's Contact Centre solution was deployed, allowing for all customer communications to be tracked and monitored, providing managers with comprehensive reporting and a real-time overview of customer satisfaction across the entire organisation.

The new choice of communication channels, combined with dramatically improved call quality, had a highly positive effect on Cottsway's overall levels of customer satisfaction, while staff voiced appreciation of the improved level of collaboration between teams, and the volume of high-quality training material that was now accessible online, thanks to the roll-out of automated call recording.

During 2020, and the forced move to a distributed workforce in response to COVID-19, this infrastructure proved invaluable in allowing Cottsway's teams to begin working remotely with minimal disruption, maintaining contact with their tenants through the same channels, with the same high standard of performance. 

About GRIDSERVE

A pioneer in the field of sustainable energy, GRIDSERVE have been developing innovative solutions for transport, energy supply, industry, food and nature, ensuring environmentally friendly options can be both accessible and affordable, all over the UK. Their current focus is the deployment of their pioneering Electric Forecourts across the UK's road and motorways, providing electric vehicles with a safe, convenient and affordable way to recharge.

Solution 

Exponential-e deployed a Layer 2 VPLS, private managed WAN across the first Electric Forecourt at Braintree, hosted at two data centres and secured with Fortigate firewalls, with a further fifteen sites planned across the UK. While this differed from GRIDSERVE's original specifications, Exponential-e's deep understanding of the project's short- and long-term goals, gained during the tender process, meant they were perfectly placed to deliver a fit-for-purpose solution. This included collaborating with other GRIDSERVE partners on fabricating custom-designed cabinets to house the specialist switching that would not only ensure a successful launch, but provide optimal scalability, in line with GRIDSERVE's long-term plans for the development of these sites.

Throughout the entire deployment process, a dedicated account team were readily available to provide hands-on support and ensure targets were met. This consultative approach meant their role soon expanded beyond simply fulfilling connectivity requirements, as they worked closely with GRIDSERVE staff and other contractors to ensure the end result would prove fit for purpose.

Thanks to strong, sustained communication and collaboration throughout this project, Exponential-e have swiftly transitioned from acting as GRIDSERVE's connectivity provider to a trusted technology partner. The focus of the partnership has moved beyond ensuring high-performance connectivity was in place for the first launch site to establishing a robust foundation for further expansion, with weekly meetings taking place to identify new opportunities for enhancements and innovations across the next fifteen sites and beyond.

In this way, the future of sustainable energy in the UK is off to an exceptional start.

Challenges

The singular nature of this project meant that GRIDSERVE had highly specific requirements when it came to the technology partner that would help deploy and maintain the underlying infrastructure, providing secure, reliable connectivity across all sites for both staff and visitors, fully isolated from the charging units to ensure operational resilience.

With high expectations for the Electric Forecourts among owners of electric vehicles, it was vital that this infrastructure was not just delivered on time, ready for the planned openings, but would offer consistently high performance at all times. Furthermore, with multiple technology and construction suppliers already involved in the creation of these sites, it was essential that the connectivity provider be able to successfully collaborate and coordinate with them, in order to ensure all elements would be effectively integrated.

The specifics of the deployment - from the type of connection to the accompanying hardware requirements - had already been discussed, reviewed and confirmed, which meant it was simply a question of selecting a partner who could fulfil these requirements on time and to budget. Following a personal recommendation, Exponential-e were invited to tender and subsequently selected, having quickly established a rapport with GRIDSERVE's own teams.

About Royal Holloway, University of London

Originally two colleges that formally became part of the University of London in 1900 and merged in 1985, Royal Holloway, University of London was one of the first institutions to make higher education available to women. Today Royal Holloway continues to display world‐class research in a number of fields, well into the 21^st century, and named as one of the top 25 of all UK Universities in The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021.

Solution 

Following a competitive process, Exponential‐e were awarded a contract, based on milestones, to deliver the fundamental piece of work to enable the university's infrastructure, starting with the merging of Microsoft tenancies.

At the start of the project, Exponential‐e provided a dedicated team to lead design workshops with Royal Holloway's key stakeholders in order to define the migration processes, drawing on their deep knowledge of the existing infrastructure to deliver a comprehensive IT transformation proposal that fulfilled a range of strict T&Cs, budget, risk and continuity requirements.

From then on, continued communication was key to achieving the desired outcomes, with regular meetings taking place to ensure targets were met, budgets were adhered to, and potential complications could be pre‐emptively resolved. To enable administrative staff to continue working effectively throughout the deployment, the university's internal teams were fully briefed on the impending changes, helping to minimise disruption and ensure end users would be properly supported.

Over a 24‐day period, Exponential‐e migrated over 10,000 Office 365 user tenancies for student, alumni and test accounts - a complex operation, but one that proved the value of Exponential‐e's robust risk guarantee. The expatiated migration was achieved using 'Cloud Commander' tooling, which provided high‐speed synchronisation (up to 1TB per hour) of data between tenancies with data fidelity for a broad range of workloads. The result was a fully managed solution for all users, with a dedicated Azure AD Connect deployment and Mail, One Drive and SharePoint migrations between the existing tenancies.

In parallel, Exponential‐e worked with Royal Holloway to create a futureproof active directory, with a move to a single forest, single domain model reducing complexity and administrative overheads. In addition, this sped up authentication and replication, and helped reduce the number of domain controllers required.

A modern hybrid authentication / identity solution was implemented, making intelligent use of Azure Active Directory, ADFS and AD as appropriate. Multi‐factor authentication mitigated cyber security risk by requiring a second form of identification before allowing access to resources and data. At the same time, allowing users to use password hash synchronisation with seamless SSO provided them each with a single set of credentials with which to access services, providing a streamlined user experience that helped drive greater collaboration in the Cloud.

An expanded deployment of Microsoft Office 365 opened the door to full online university status, allowing lectures and seminars to continue via the highly regarded Microsoft Teams platform, with the new infrastructure enabling greater utilisation of the Public Cloud, delivering the increased power, flexibility, and cost control. In particular, a Virtual Desktop solution and a range of tools for multi‐channel communication and collaboration made it easy for students to submit essays and receive their marks remotely.

Finally, to provide a secure, flexible non‐production environment, replica domains and Office 365 environments were deployed, consisting of the 'bare bones' of the primary operating environment.

The partnership between Royal Holloway and Exponential‐e continues to evolve, with remote collaboration opening up new channels of learning, supported by an infrastructure with the power, flexibility and scalability to guarantee consistent performance - all while keeping the student experience at the centre of everything.

Challenges

With the onset of COVID‐19, Royal Holloway re‐focused its 2020/21 IT programme with a view to achieving full online university status, delivering teaching, learning and research through multi‐channel communication and collaboration. To achieve this, the university required a scalable, cost‐effective and high‐performance solution for remote collaboration (e.g. group chat, file sharing, notebook sharing, assessment setting), supported by the right infrastructure.

One of the major limiting factors in this regard was that staff and students were in two separate tenancies, which would need to be consolidated.

In addition to the live environment, the university required a 'non‐production' environment to facilitate controlled software development, testing, and UAT, with minimal operating costs.

With a new academic year fast approaching, it was essential that all these solutions could be delivered within an eight‐week window.

About Stephen George + Partners 

Stephen George + Partners (SGP) is one of the UK's leading architectural practices, with offices throughout the UK and Europe. It is placed in the 'Top 100' practices by the Architects' Journal and prides itself on responding rapidly to client requirements, resolving complex site issues and producing innovative designs.

Challenges

Faced with the relocation of their Head Office in Leicester to a new space they would be designing from the ground up, SGP were not only moving their central hub, but also relocating all their IT equipment. With a refresh of legacy server infrastructure already planned, this coinciding with the relocation prompted the practice to explore alternative ways to deliver apps and design data. Throughout these discussions, the security of devices and corporate data was a concern, since confidential plans and proposals being leaked would be disastrous for the practice's strong reputation.

In modernising how key applications such as Autodesk Revit and other design packages are delivered, the challenge remains regarding where the data resides. Modern visualisations and BIM models are substantial in volume and have their own data gravity, which typically required user desktops to always remain close to the source of data to avoid drops in performance.

For this reason, servers were previously deployed within each office to achieve the desired performance, availability and resilience. However, this was costly to implement and maintain, and required significant resources to manage the infrastructure across these dispersed locations. For example, patching and updating these servers was the responsibility of the inhouse IT team and was always undertaken out of hours.

Furthermore, designing and deploying a server room is costly and the end result has an inherently limited lifespan, when we consider the increasing speed of Cloud adoption. It was clear that this floorspace would be more valuable for a business-generating resource, rather than as an ongoing expense for the housing of IT assets.

Finally, a legacy on-premise phone system offered limited functionality and scalability, which would not support the expansion into new office locations, nor meet the increasing expectation amongst staff for home working options.

The relatively slow uptake of Cloud within the Architecture sector meant SGP soon found there was no pre-existing model for what they required to meet these challenges. As a result, they began evaluating potential IT partners, with a key requirement being that the chosen candidate must be able to deliver all the required services, in order to eliminate the need to manage multiple vendors and ensure an efficient migration.

Solution

Following a period of intensive evaluation, including data centre visits SGP selected Exponential-e as their new IT partner. Based on their in-depth evaluation of the project requirements, Exponential-e scaled up a resilient Network solution which connects all of SGP's locations. This was integrated with our secure Virtual Data Centre where a new server infrastructure has been built resiliently. Desktop deployment has now been provisioned using managed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure enhanced with NVIDIA graphics. Our Cisco Broadsoft Unified Communications solution has enabled effortless communication and collaboration between staff across all locations.

Exponential-e also project managed the migration from beginning to end, ensuring it was completed to schedule, with zero downtime. This included regular communication with SGP's IT team throughout, ensuring complete visibility. In the end, the migration was so seamless the users were able to log on and begin using it as soon as launch day arrived, fully embracing the new opportunities available for remote working, which later proved invaluable as the practice adapted its working environment in response to COVID-19. As Senior Partner Michael Barker explained:

"The solution has made remote working work. Previously our people were using a VPN and experiencing numerous problems. Now though, our people can do serious architectural modelling work from a service-station café if they need to. The solution works perfectly, anywhere. This gives our people so much flexibility. And it gives our organisation flexibility, too, as we look to expand."

"The IT investment we made over the previous year or so has proved to be a lifesaver during the pandemic. Not only were we able to move at 24 hours' notice to 100% homeworking without a hitch, but we have demonstrated that we can work effectively anywhere and that our business continuity plan, having now been tested in the real world, is totally effective."

Throughout the project, data protection and compliance with regulations such as the GDPR were key priorities, as SGP works with clients in a number of sectors with extremely specific compliance requirements in this regard, such as healthcare. The rigorous security standards Exponential-e operates to including annual testing of all data centre systems and inbuilt data loss protection measures provides both SGP and its customers with complete peace of mind when storing project files in the Cloud.

All in all, SGP's experience provides an object lesson in how architectural practices can benefit from the Cloud and digital transformation, and a potent illustration of why these technologies are being increasingly embraced by their industry. What digital transformation offers, beyond cost and space savings, is a better way of doing things and a clear path for future innovation. As Michael Barker summarised:

"During the solution delivery, and since then, we have never felt a loss of control from within our organisation. Far from diminishing the practice's control, the technology provided by Exponential-e and Exponential-e's management of it gives Stephen George more control of its current operations and future direction as a practice."

Solution benefits

• Seamless Cloud migration, with zero downtime
• Significant increase in online storage space
• Optimal application performance
• A successful move to remote working
• Full data security and compliance  
  

"The solution has made remote working work. Previously our people were using a VPN and experiencing numerous problems. Now though, our people can do serious architectural modelling work from a service-station café if they need to. The solution works perfectly, anywhere. This gives our people so much flexibility. And it gives our organisation flexibility, too, as we look to expand."

Michael Barker Senior Partner, Stephen George + Partners

About ABPI

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) represents innovative research-based biopharmaceutical companies, large, medium and small, leading an exciting new era of biosciences in the UK.

The ABPI is recognised by government as the industry body negotiating on behalf of the branded pharmaceutical industry for statutory consultation requirements, including the pricing scheme for medicines in the UK.

Solution 

Throughout the whole tender process it was felt that Exponential-e had a quality that couldn't be matched and as Exponential-e were already an existing supplier of a Private VPN between ABPI's 3 site, this gave ABPI the confidence that Exponential-e could handle their IT transformation requirements. Their previous experience with Exponential-e and the quality of the services that were provided meant that they were happy to engage Exponential-e for their future IT needs.

Requiring a large review of their services, ABPI instructed Exponential-e to provide them with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), 24 / 7 x 365 service desk support, an on-site engineer at their Head Office, managed service support of their applications, virtual firewalls and ongoing Network support.

During the migration to Exponential-e, ABPI were able to address a good proportion of the improvements that they were not able to facilitate with their previous supplier.

Despite a vast amount of modernisation, change in existing services and the opportunity to address all existing problems the implementation of the service was professionally handled by Exponential-e's project managers - with a smooth implementation of all services.

The end result meant that ABPI were able to simplify their IT estate, and in particular their Network, whilst selecting one supplier for all their requirements - protected by a single end-to-end SLA.

 Challenges

With 3 sites, The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) required resilient and reliable services that would enable them to carry out the important work that they do for companies across the UK.

Their relationship with their legacy provider had been tarnished due to long periods of underwhelming service, slow engagement on service improvements and the lack of a diverse product range.

This meant that ABPI were using and maintaining an aging IT environment that was no longer suitable for their needs or requirements. Their ability to adapt or improve upon this further constrained by the restrictions of their existing supplier.

Naturally the ABPI therefore had to look at other avenues, and began their research in to suppliers that could provide them with what they wanted and required. A full-scale refresh was the obvious resolution to their existing archaic infrastructure to ensure that all systems were modern and future-proofed.

Solution benefits

• With previous experience of using Exponential-e as a supplier of a Private VPN between ABPI's numerous sites, ABPI knew that they could trust Exponential-e with their business transformation.
• Throughout the tender process Exponential-e "oozed a quality that others failed to match - despite some very strong competition" and this further supported ABPI's choice to select Exponential-e for this project.
• Exponential-e's exceptionally strong technical team and professional, skilled project management team also aided in ensuring that the transformation for ABPI was fluid and confirmed that their trust in Exponential-e was well placed.
  

About Abercorn School 

Established in 1987, Abercorn School aims to offer its pupils the best start in education by providing a friendly and inspiring academic atmosphere where a true love of learning is nurtured.

The school has gained an enviable record of excellence and achievement for boys and girls from 2½ to 13 years of age. They guide both pupils and parents through the education process to ensure their pupils attain the highest standards and meet their potential.

Abercorn are firm believers in traditional values and standards. However, they are committed to embracing the best of what the 21st century will offer to aid in preparing pupils to face the challenges of the modern world with confidence and competence.

Solution 

Implementing connectivity into the new premises for Abercorn School was a priority, and a September 2015 deadline had Exponential-e working fast. From beginning to end, implementation and testing of a super-fast, low latency Internet line was installed in to the new building in just 6 weeks. This allowed the school to ensure they were up and running in time for the arrival of pupils for the new school year.

A key requirement was for the Internet to be robust and reliable, ensuring that lessons were productive for pupils and that staff were able to access resources as and when they needed to.

The next solution that Exponential-e worked to implement was a refreshed telephony system that would allow Abercorn to reduce costs and increase call quality. A Hosted Voice solution offered Abercorn "fantastic call quality" and was "very easy to use" - that alongside the cost savings it delivered meant that Abercorn implemented this solution in to their second site too.

With communication between the two sites ever increasing, it made sense for Abercorn to look in to a Smart WAN, which provides connectivity between the two sites as if they were using a single LAN. This enables faster communication and file transfer between sites, as well as allowing staff to better communicate with each other.

With space at a premium within the schools, VDCs looked like an ideal method for the school to store data and infrastructure without having to find the space for physical servers within their building. With this sitting within the Cloud, managed by Exponential-e, Abercorn could also be reassured that their servers were being proactively monitored by our 24 / 7 x 365 service desk to ensure resilient uptime.

Another benefit of the VDC solution was the fact that the school could better manage its IT budget, with the requirement to only pay for what they required - and with scalability being incredibly easy they could increase or decrease server space when necessary.

Built on trust the relationship between Exponential-e and Abercorn School has grown and grown and they continue to look to other solutions which weren't part of their initial request for services. Exponential-e was able to reassure Abercorn that the service would work by allowing them to test Internet and telephony services prior to the services officially going live. This provided the school with the confidence they needed to embark upon the relationship and implement its services.

 Challenges

When Abercorn originally approached Exponential-e their school in new premises was not yet open and they had poor connectivity within their existing building. This was therefore a priority for Abercorn, and Exponential-e were selected to provide the service.

Abercorn also had a second site which they needed to communicate with frequently. They were keen to implement increased connectivity between these sites. At the time they were using an existing phone line and spending around £500 a month on calling their other sites. This was a challenge that was resolved by a Hosted Voice solution, which Exponential-e further provided to Abercorn to enable increase communication and collaboration - whilst enabling cost savings.

Solution benefits

• Internet Connectivity - enabled school to open on time and provide both pupils and staff with a reliable, fast Internet connection.
• Hosted voice solution - means that the school are saving around £500 a month on calls between sites, with the quality of the calls also being greatly improved.
• Wide Area Network (WAN) - between sites enables more resilient connectivity, as well as allowing users faster communication with those at other locations.
• VPN Access - allowing staff to work remotely enabled access to documents and data.
  

We recognize that educational organisations need to demonstrate the highest possible standards in technology, as well as focusing on cost efficiencies to deliver ROI. Read our education booklet to discover our solutions to specific eduactional IT challenges.

About Allport Cargo Services

Founded in 1963 Allport Cargo Services operate in 30 countries, with representation in another 100.

Their Network extends to 450 offices, with more than 21,000 colleagues and a worldwide turnover exceeding £600 million.

Headquartered in Cowley, Middlesex, their 800 UK based colleagues operate out of 20 hi-tech logistics hubs, freight centres and packaging factories: picking, packing and transporting cargo globally every day for customers across a range of sectors.

Solution 

To increase the flexibility and scalability of its Network, Exponential-e worked with channel partner Ideal Networks to migrate Allport's existing Network to its VPLS Network. This solution emulates a Layer 2 VLAN allowing the nine geographically diverse sites to connect as if they were on the same LAN.

The flatter Network structure is easier for Allport to manage, and the solution has built-in resilience by incorporating dual, carrier agnostic routers at each site. As a result, Allport is able to ensure optimum Network performance at all times.

As well as receiving 24 / 7 support and technical maintenance from Ideal Networks and Exponential-e, Allport has also been able to increase the visibility of its Network via a tailored web portal, allowing them to better plan Network resources according to business demands.

 Challenges

Allport Cargo Services, a global freight, supply chain and added value logistics company, was looking to update its existing WAN infrastructure to increase resilience and responsiveness across its Network.

Allport wished to transition to a responsive service provider who could proactively support the migration and management of an upgraded Network. This move would help Allport improve the development of its critical business systems ultimately enabling the business to increase efficiency and drive productivity.

Allport was looking for a flexible and scalable WAN infrastructure to connect multiple sites across the UK. Key to Allport's business proposition is the availability and speed of data transfer across its Network. The Network underpins every process within the business and therefore the provision of a resilient and scalable Network is essential in day-to-day operations.

Allport sought a service provider that could offer not only a more scalable Network but also a management, analysis and monitoring platform. These value added services would allow Allport's IT managers to focus on internal processes and demands.

Solution benefits

• Allport has ensured its business continuity by migrating to a Network that will be able to accommodate future business expansion. By increasing its available bandwidth, Allport has seen immediate improvement and has been able to begin work upgrading its critical business processes, a task which had previously been on hold due to the previous limited bandwidth. These upgrades allow staff to respond to customers more quickly and ultimately have improved customer satisfaction.
• Through working with Ideal Networks and Exponential-e, Allport has benefited from a responsive team of engineers who can offer true 24 / 7 technical support and management across all its sites. Exponential-e is able to provide proactive monitoring and analysis of Network activity to enable Allport to respond more quickly to Network issues.

About Anthony Nolan

Anthony Nolan, now in its 40th anniversary year, was the world's first bone marrow register. The blood cancer charity has been saving lives for four decades by matching remarkable people willing to donate their bone marrow to patients in desperate need of a transplant.

Anthony Nolan operates an extensive global database of over 500,000 bone marrow, or stem cell, donors. This database enables the charity to provide over 1,000 blood cancer patients with a matching stem cell donor every year.

Solution 

Anthony Nolan decided to migrate its existing infrastructure, previously housed in its headquarters in London, to two data centre sites operated by Exponential-e in London. Key to the solution is improving business continuity through migrating the servers to these sites and therefore into dedicated off-site facilities.

Anthony Nolan chose to adopt Exponential-e's VPLS into the solution, Exponential-e's Tier 3 facilities have enterprise-class connectivity provided over a Network built and integrated for 100% uptime.

By connecting over Exponential-e's virtual private LAN, Anthony Nolan is also able to extend its own Network to capture all of its offices on one private WAN. The Network also provides dual resilience enabling further contingency and security.

 Challenges

With over 60,000 new donors registering per year, the rapid growth of the organisation and the volume of data it processes, means it is essential for Anthony Nolan to safeguard the management of its data to ensure business continuity. Registries across the world access the database 24 hours a day looking for a potential donor match for people with blood cancer.

If the database is not available or accessible, registries are not able to access it and this critical activity cannot take place.

Whilst the database must be constantly available, it also needs to be scalable. Anthony Nolan has a number of agreements with other donor databases, which are set to be incorporated into the same infrastructure - the set-up must be resilient enough to support this growth in data and the associated search requests.

In addition to this growth, the charity has targets to increase the rate of growth of registered donors, and is currently on track to achieve its target of 60,000 new donors every year. Its infrastructure must support this planned growth long-term.

Solution benefits

• Implemented private Cloud and VPLS solution.
• Future-proofed and scalable infrastructure.
• Business continuity through both Cloud and Network infrastructure.
• Data is always secure and private, across its own WAN and Exponential-e Tier 3 facilities.

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.

About Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group

The Rezidor Hotel Group is one of the fastest growing hotel companies worldwide and a member of the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, one of the world's ten largest hotel groups.

Rezidor features a portfolio of more than 435 hotels in operation and under development with over 95,000 rooms in 71 countries.

About Channel 4

Enabling multi-platform content delivery for Channel 4's on-demand platform.

Channel 4 was the first UK broadcaster to launch an on-demand platform in 2006, 4oDTV, which quickly proved to be the most popular commercial TV service on the Internet. Since then, 4oD has continued to grow considerably each year, with 28 million monthly video views and 7.6 million unique users per month able to choose when, where and what content they watch.

Solution 

Exponential-e was selected for its Network which offers low latency, low-jitter and no packet loss. The Network was already proven in broadcasting environments with Exponential-e serving other major broadcasters.

As Exponential-e was already supplying a 1Gig fibre circuit to Channel 4, connecting various offices in London, it was a trusted partner. Andrew Bell, Technical Project Manager, Broadcast and Engineering, explained the reasons for selecting Exponential-e:

"We chose Exponential-e, as they have been a partner since May 2006 and their service has been excellent. The technology delivers and their teams ensure we enjoy a good working relationship with more than satisfactory service levels. They already had a quality broadcast network in place, so it seemed a natural choice for the latest deployment"

Exponential-e worked closely with Channel 4 to upgrade the existing Network to a 1Gbps capacity, which is capable of supporting bandwidth hungry content such as encoded video files, metadata, ancillary assets, subtitling data and images on a daily basis. The Network is highly resilient and scalable, backed by 99.99% Service Level Agreements to ensure next to no packet loss occurs; it enables real-time data delivery that is crucial in broadcast environments.

This allows for fast and efficient delivery of media rich content to a newly outsourced production facility at RedBee Media, where the preparation of non-linear content takes place, playout and transmission. Content is then distributed via Exponential-e's multiple point-to-point e-pipes to various partners and content providers, including IOKO, Home Choice, Virgin Media, BT Vision, Inqb8r and On Demand.

The upgrade enabled Channel 4 to eliminate the time-intensive use of tapes and hard drives, where content needed to be transferred to hard drives then shipped to various UK locations by couriers and post. It also no longer needs to host large FTP sites for content distribution.

Rather than relying on an antiquated manual process, we now have a Network in place that supports an automated workflow, dramatically speeding up our processes. We can now deliver a large number of content directly onto the platforms much faster, significantly freeing up internal resources and making operational cost savings" explains Andrew Bell.

Channel 4 is also looking to deploy a fail-safe backup Network in the event of a disaster situation, leveraging Exponential-e's 1GigE Connection and circuit resilience to ensure no disruptions or downtime occurs.

1. Channel 4 now has a resilient quality Network in place that can push content to multiple platforms quickly and efficiently, providing operational cost-savings and resource efficiencies. This also enables Channel 4 to meet time-to-market deadlines for service launches and deploy services in a quicker fashion.
2. Since the launch, 4oD has forged new paths into content delivery and is now available on multiple platforms, including YouTube, Seesaw, iPads, iPhones, PlayStations and on TV video on demand services.

 Challenges

Since its launch, 4oD has continued to grow considerably each year, placing an ever increasing demand on its existing distribution Network. This demand reached a peak when Channel 4 prepared to re-launch its 4oD service to provide viewers with access to all its archives. To prepare for the launch, Channel 4 needed to source a quality broadcast Network provider, capable of distributing all of its non-linear programming on a daily basis. The Network also needed to support a newly automated workflow, where a large number of content would be directly pushed onto various platforms. As a result, Channel 4 began to evaluate possible suppliers.

Solution benefits

• High-speed 1Gbps Network.
• 99.99% Service Level Agreements.
• Fail-over backup Network.
• Broadcast quality, low jitter and no packet loss Network.