Swan Housing Association

For more than fifteen years Swan Housing Association has provided high quality, affordable homes throughout Essex, Suffolk and East London. Managing over 9,000 properties, Swan has combined expertise, commercial understanding, flexibility and innovation to ensure that residents are always put first.

Since initially engaging with Network Resource Group (NRG) seven years ago Swan has had the confidence to completely outsource its IT support and infrastructure. As the relationship has developed this trust has been rewarded; through empathising with and understanding Swan’s strong corporate ethos and policies, NRG has been able to tailor a unique service set that is both resilient and flexible.

Geoff Weedon, Swan’s Head of IT, has worked with NRG to ensure that workers across the region have access to the IT facilities they need. “As a housing association we have many remote offices. We need to work as one unit, and when you have fourteen different sites bringing these together into one central unit is hard enough as it is”.

LANKonnect, NRG’s proprietary communications solution, has proved to be the foundation for Swan to provide services to all sites, and with Quality of Service playing a key role in delivery and roll-out of VOIP and other resources, Geoff can be satisfied that he is utilising the ideal service: “It’s about reliability and performance, and as it stands it’s pretty damn good. You can actually logon to a phone and terminal at any of these sites and it’s job done. It’s reliable, it’s consistent, it’s secure; it’s a great WAN”.

Along with the strong suite of services that the LANKonnect solution provides, Geoff is aware of the clear cost benefits the network brings: “I think it’s essential as a housing association to have a managed WAN. LANKonnect is 40% cheaper than MPLS. As an organisation it is essential and it’s a good choice”.

As part of a multi-phased project, NRG have virtualised Swan’s network. This, to Geoff, has been essential: “We had a limited business continuity plan. Virtualisation has now made it complete. The ability to actually transfer or replicate 10TB of storage data – I can’t even begin to tell you how pleased I am with that. To have 31 separate servers trying to replicate to a data centre 30 miles away– bizarre. You can’t do it efficiently and the cost doesn’t bear thinking about. Now they’re virtualised it’s being done, and that helps me sleep at night. If we have a disaster at our head office, we can push a button and go live on the servers up in London. That is such a difference, and that is the biggest benefit to me as a customer. We couldn’t have done it without virtualisation – that’s a massive achievement for all of us”.

Geoff sums up his experience of the project: “From my point of view you guys have done a fantastic job. Virtualisation is the way to go for an organisation like us. I cannot imagine a similar organisation in the world that wouldn’t do it if they had the funds available. You guys came up with the plan, the plan was followed and it was delivered on time and within budget. It’s been managed really well and as we go along there’s going to be hiccups but you guys have a handle on it and they’re dealt with swiftly and professionally – you can’t ask for more. I’m very confident in you”.