Bespoke technology solutions for the UK healthcare sector's digital pioneer

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 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 the Guinness World Records

For over 62 years, Guinness World Records (GWR) has produced The Guinness Book of World Records, a book that documents record-breaking achievements and that itself holds a record: having sold 141 million copies, it's the best-selling copyrighted book of all time. In spite of these gargantuan sales figures and a globe-spanning reputation, the book has been and continues to be pulled together by a relatively small (but geographically dispersed) in-house team.

As a company, however, GWR has been expanding. Today, GWR is no longer only a book publisher - it is a multimedia brand agency with key presence across Digital, Events and Business Solutions. Working with leading brands and businesses, GWR delivers bespoke marketing campaigns, using record-breaking events to create inspirational, highly shareable content.

Solution 

To kick off its Cloud migration, GWR enlisted Exponential-e to migrate 200 of its employees from the existing onpremises Exchange to Office 365. Rob Howe knew that Microsoft's cloud-based business productivity suite would help overcome the challenges to collaboration posed by the company's geographic spread, enabling its workforce to collaborate to deliver engaging experiences and capitalise on market opportunities across the globe.

He also knew that Exponential-e would be the perfect partner to see GWR through this crucial first phase towards digitisation. Exponential-e had been providing critical communications services to GWR - from private connectivity between UK data centres and GWR's Beijing office to 10Gbps connectivity and hosted telephony - for close to five years. The mutual trust and understanding that this work had built between GWR and Exponential-e laid the groundwork for a remarkably speedy and successful Office 365 transition.

As Howe comments: "Our previous experience with Exponential-e gave me peace of mind. I know that they do what they say they will." Laying the foundations for a "painless" project Planning for the project began in July 2017. By September, work had started, with the core migration completed, as planned, in November. In order to complete a complex migration in less than three months, Exponential-e's team had to ensure the process would go off without a hitch.

And, in fact, it did: looking back on the process, Rob Howe describes the migration as "painless". In his view, this painlessness of execution was due largely to Exponential-e's meticulous planning.

"They are really good at going through things in detail and making sure they understand the business and key dates, rather than just the technology," says Howe.

Office 365 is also playing a crucial part in enabling GWR' IT department to transform its business function. It is proving extremely effective in helping the department to execute its strategic goal of supporting flexibility and mobility. Again, OneDrive provides a striking example to illustrate this, eliminating the need to move user files between machines, and greatly reducing the time it takes for the IT department to roll out PCs and devices to staff. Howe: "We've gone from rolling out one machine in a day and a half to rolling out two a day, which is a big improvement."

A key milestone on the path to the future It's improvements like this that are freeing GWR's IT department up to play a more proactive role in the wider business. And this, as Howe explains, is in turn helping GWR as a whole to move forward with its technology agenda and expand as a business:

"The Office 365 project has allowed our department to take a big step forward in becoming more flexible and responsive - and less reactive - to the business. It's allowing us to get out in front, which is key, especially as we continue to expand and diversify as a business and add new services."

The "painless" success of this project, GWR's first major foray into cloud, has been crucial in giving Rob Howe and his colleagues the confidence to continue heading in the direction of digitisation. "Going forward, every year there will be something new we're looking to expand into," he says, "so this was a key first step, and if it hadn't gone smoothly it would have made everything else far more challenging."

The Office 365 project has allowed our department to take a big step forward in becoming more flexible and responsive – and less reactive - to the business. It's allowing us to get out in front, which is key, especially as we continue to expand and diversify as a business and add new services.

Rob Howe IT Director, Guinness World Records.

 Challenges

"We cannot be confined by old ways of working…"

The rapid growth and diversification of GWR as a business over the past five years has equired a radical rethinking of its technology requirements. Under the guidance of Rob Howe, IT Director at GWR for six years, the company has pursued a strategy of digitisation, encompassing infrastructure, service delivery and security.

This strategy is underpinned by an overhauling of GWR's internal setup from an infrastructure and applications perspective. GWR's IT department has embraced the cloud, recognising that this supports the business's push to become more flexible, agile and dynamic in order to cope with the demands of a growing business.

Rob Howe explains: "It is the IT department's job to make sure we can respond to the ever-growing changes within our business model, so we can take up new opportunities and move into new markets. Going forward, cloud gives us far more flexibility to grow, rather than being constrained, and that's always my focus – that we have more options than less."

GWR is a truly global company; in the last six years the company's corporate footprint has oubled from three offices to six, with sites in London, Miami, New York, Dubai, Beijing and Tokyo, with additional remote workers placed at over 15 locations.

About the FSA

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent government department that works across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to protect public health by maintaining food safety and hygiene standards. Through a rigorous, scientific approach, the FSA ensures consumers across the UK can trust the food they eat is both safe and correctly labelled.

The environment in which we operate and the connectivity we need is rapidly evolving. Working with the Exponential-e team, we've valued their expertise in being able to migrate us from one environment to another and the innovation that they've been able to bring to that changing landscape.

Tim Lewis, Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency

Solution 

The resulting migration involved close collaboration and coordination with other participants in the Evolve IT programme, particularly the LAN and service desk providers, in order to minimise service disruption and ensure a successful integration with the existing infrastructure. This involved multiple weekly or daily calls - covering everything from product management to solution design - which not only maintained open channels of communication, but also helped drive better customer relations - a model that continues to this day.

The resulting deployment boosted connectivity at plant sites across the UK, with a new network infrastructure that connects back to the FSA's corporate network. Secured by a centralised firewall, the network consists of the FSA's five main office sites with fibre WAN, plus all 173 plant sites. Exponential-e also took ownership of the FSA's 173 PSTN lines, in order to manage its entire plant estate. Other key elements were a resilient, high-performance centralised internet, colocation based in Enfield and SSL VPN remote access to the FSA's corporate network for 1,200 end users. Later, these new channels for remote working proved invaluable in allowing the FSA to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to a 24 / 7 x 365 service desk, Exponential-e also provided a dedicated account director and service manager, who would provide tailored reporting at all meetings and play an active part in identifying and acting on new opportunities. Taking a proactive, customer-focused approach to resolving service issues has allowed Exponential-e to actively support the FSA's 'Evergreen' initiative, utilising a strategic renewal plan, where savings from unused ADSL lines are used to upgrade to FTTC, which was later extended to all FSA sites.

This hands-on support was further enhanced with centralised monitoring, utilising the Insight Advanced and Insight for Broadband solutions, which improved operational efficiency and helped drive more data-driven decision making, leading to tangible cost savings and a move towards 'internet first' strategies.

This level of agility and scalability was only achieved by developing close partnerships between the FSA, Exponential-e and other Evolve IT participants, which have continued developing since the point of inception, building on a strong, scalable foundation to support ongoing growth and deliver new innovations on a regular basis.

When your organisation is geographically spread, robust connectivity is a vital strategic asset to underpin effective remote working and access. In these situations, a good end-user experience is key, because people can't understand why such a simple thing should be so hard. The network we've implemented with the FSA is designed to create a better and more productive working environment and provide the stable platform required to meet compliance and regulation timeframes.

David Lozdan, Head of Public Sector Sales, Exponential-e

To ensure food standards and safety, it's vital for us to provide a secure, reliable communications platform with a good user experience for our team of inspectors. This has been especially true during COVID-19 where the ability to act and communicate swiftly and effectively has been essential to keeping the food supply lines safe and operational.

Tim Lewis, Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency

 Challenges

About Fidessa

Fidessa Group is a global business with scale, resilience, ambition and expertise - providing Financial Trading, investment and information solutions. 85% of the world's premier financial institutions trust Fidessa to provide them with multi-asset trading and investment infrastructure, market data and analysis, and decision making and workflow technology. $10 trillion worth of transactions flow across its global Network each year. Being a market leader, they also offer unique access to the world's largest and most valuable trading community of buy-side and sell-side professionals, from global institutions and investment banks to boutique brokers and niche hedge funds.

Solution 

Fidessa approached Exponential-e to solve this challenge after an introduction via one of its group companies, LatentZero which was already an Exponential-e customer. LatentZero knew of Exponential-e's technology and expertise and spoke highly of its potential to solve the automated failover challenge. Another key factor in choosing Exponential-e was its expertise in dealing swiftly with Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) applications.

At the start of the project Exponential-e helped by fulfilling the first requirement of obtaining Provider Independent (PI) IP addresses from RIPE NCC. To get Fidessa up and running quickly, a temporary subnet of Provider-Aggregatable (PA) IP addresses were provided by Exponential-e for the 100Mbps Internet connections installed at the primary office in Woking and the office in London. After RIPE NCC allocated Provider Independent (PI) IP addresses to Fidessa, Exponential-e smoothly facilitated the migration to the PI IP addresses from the temporary PA ones provided.

At the primary connection in Woking, a dynamic routing protocol was configured to be used during normal times. In the event of the primary connection failing, a floating, static route will automatically reroute the Internet traffic via the backup circuit in London.

The failover will then be managed by a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session, where a lower metric is configured at Woking, ensuring it is the primary route, and a higher metric is configured in London, ensuring it is only used if there is a fault with the service at Woking. However, both locations will still be able to send outbound traffic independently as needed.

 Challenges

With so many major financial institutions relying on Fidessa and the company's commitment to providing resilient services to its customers, effective Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is imperative for the company. In a BCP situation the IT department might be dealing with ten or more different issues to resolve. Should there be a disaster, keeping resources free to resolve the issues that require manual attention is ideal.

Therefore, the challenge Fidessa faced was automating as much of its BCP as possible. Among the many Financial Trading tools and services that Fidessa provides, one of them includes delivery of web-based services, such as its award winning fragmentation analysis tools.

The company required resilient infrastructure to deliver these services to the international trading community and required automated failover to its London office in the event of a fault with the service at the company's head office in Woking.

The major problem Fidessa came across in trying to solve this challenge was that most providers did not have the technology or expertise necessary to provide automated failover in a BCP scenario.

After having dealt with a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), needing to change IP addresses because of relocations and to become more flexible in the delivery of its web-based services, Fidessa first realised it needed to obtain its own subnet of IP addresses. Secondly, the organisation realised that the provider for Internet connectivity would need to have Network reach combined with innovative technology and know-how to deliver an automated, seamless failover between Woking and London.

Two of the world's largest communications providers were approached; however, Fidessa determined that neither organisation was flexible enough nor could they provide the type of failover desired to ensure minimum impact during a disaster. These providers required manual intervention and changes to Fidessa's core Network for failover to occur between the Woking and London offices.

This was not ideal to fulfil the company's Business Continuity plans - time and effort needed would be labour and resource intensive - taking away from where these resources could be used in a disaster situation.

About Claremont High School Academy

Claremont High School Academy is a multi-specialist school which specialises in Performing Arts, Maths & Computing and Applied Learning. Based in Harrow, Greater London, the school has over 1,500 students and offers a breadth of learning opportunities. Rated 'outstanding' by Ofsted, it strives to ensure that students follow a personalised curriculum in a safe and secure, yet educationally challenging environment.

Solution 

After an in-depth solution assessment which was presented to the school's board, Exponential-e was selected to provide Claremont High School Academy with a scalable high-speed Internet service. Selection criteria included: company reputation and delivery framework, education sector experience, technology solution, cost-effectiveness and service levels.

Daniel Kirby commented: "The quality of the service has been excellent. The Connectivity is reliable and robust and we always get good response rates on the ping. The support and ongoing communications has been better than any other company that we deal with."

Exponential-e worked closely with Claremont High School Academy to ensure the new Internet service was delivered timely to coincide with the school holidays. The school's new service is delivered over an uncontended 100Mbps fibre-optic Connection with the same high-speed uploads as downloads - ensuring staff and students can quickly access and upload coursework from home. In addition, with Exponential-e's own Network integrated with the world's major content delivery Networks, such as BBC and YouTube, educational video content is only one hop away and can easily be streamed in classes without delays.

After successfully deploying the new Internet connection, Exponential-e was also approached to deliver a secure, automated Online Backup Service for the school's mission critical servers. The backup data is carried over the Internet connection via private peering to secure storage in Tier 3 UK-based Data Centres.

"Exponential-e went above and beyond all the other companies. They weren't just trying to make a sale; they're very passionate about what they do. When they invited us to come and see their Network Operations Centre and meet its employees, as well as offered to put us in contact with other schools using Exponential-e services, we knew it was the right company for us. We always receive regular phone calls from them asking how we're getting on. We just don't get that level of attention from any of our other suppliers."

 Challenges

With a growing student population and a newly installed virtual learning platform, Claremont High School Academy's bandwidth was no longer sufficient for the school's needs. The school regularly peaked in its data usage with even basic server administration tasks such as offsite backups taking a considerable time to complete. Since the school's new virtual learning platform was hosted on site, uploading and downloading coursework remotely over the Internet was a slow process. This made it inconvenient for staff and students to access the platform from home and hampered the schools ability to provide an outstanding learning experience.

Daniel Kirby, Network Manager at Claremont High School Academy commented: "We'd hit our limit in terms of bandwidth and it was really affecting our staff and students since accessing coursework could be incredibly slow. We needed to increase our bandwidth substantially and we also needed a more scalable and reliable solution."

The school was also promoting the use of educational video content from YouTube and BBC iPlayer within their classes.

However, with existing bandwidth not being sufficient, streaming video content over the Internet posed real challenges and often wasted valuable teaching time.

As a result, the school recognised the need for a change and approached a number of providers to find a more suitable Internet service capable of supporting the new technologies which are required to deliver a 21st century educational experience. Any new solution would need to be robust, reliable, scalable and cost-effective.

Features 

• Increased bandwidth capacity and performance.
• Savings on infrastructure costs by delivering multiple services over the same connection.
• Improved virtual learning experience with symmetrical upload and download speeds.

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.