About City Gateway

City Gateway works to transform the lives of children, young people and women who are most impacted by social and economic inequality and exclusion.

They aim to ensure that they benefit from stronger foundations for learning at school, easier transitions into adulthood, better job prospects, healthier relationships and improved mental and physical health.

They provide safe, sustainable and meaningful programmes that ensure communities develop the skills and confidence that will launch them into long-term education, employment or enterprise.

Solution 

City Gateway needed a provider that could offer them the services that they required, with a solution built for them and their needs.

They wanted the technical capability to support them and ensure delivery of the solution by the tight deadline. They also had their vision of opening schools across London in mind, so were hoping that Exponential-e could deliver on this project and many more.

Throughout the entire project, from planning through installation, implementation and go live Exponential-e supported and advised City Gateway to ensure that the process was as fluid as possible.

City Gateway now have their exact requirements, in a scalable and fully managed voice solution alongside reliable, superfast Internet Connectivity. All are able to support their infrastructure and users.

Provided on time and to budget, Exponential-e were able to surpass the expectations of City Gateway. Exponential-e continues to provide ongoing support to City Gateway and offers them technical knowledge, input and support when required.

 Challenges

City Gateway were moving from temporary accommodation in the East End of London to new premises on the Isle of Dogs. A new change of location heralded the requirement for new, reliable and cost-effective connectivity and telephony services.

The existing service provider was proving relatively expensive for the organisation and was also unable to provide all of the services that City Gateway required.

City Gateway looked for a service provider that could offer them flexible Internet connectivity and a scalable managed telephony service. They approached a number of providers to see what they had to offer and went through a rigorous selection process, eventually deciding to use Exponential-e as they felt they offered everything they were looking for.

Timing was critical for the move aligned to the implementation of the new services, as City Gateway had to open at the start of a new school term - meaning that the deadline was unavoidable.

Solution benefits

• Exponential-e offered everything that City Gateway were looking for, and delivered the solution in a timely, efficient and seamless manner.
• City Gateway are very pleased with the performance and reliability of the services, alongside the ongoing support. Their services were implemented and provided on time and on budget.
• They now have exactly what they wanted: a flexible, scalable and reliable fully managed telephony service and a reliable high capacity Internet Connection.

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 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.