CHOOSING CLOUD HOSTING

Network Homes manages more than 20,000 homes across London and the South East. They’ve relied on our housing system since 2010 and were keen to get the latest features. Yet their hardware would need replacing to do it, so they decided to review the approach.

Network Homes considered three options:

• Firstly, to upgrade the server in their off-site data centre.
• Secondly, to add housing to their other systems in the Azure cloud.
• Finally, to move to a hosted solution in our secure data centre.

Christo Gouws is Director of IT and Transformation: “More than 450 people use our housing system, so our choice had to work for them. We also had to look at affordability, including ongoing running costs.”

On both cost and performance grounds, our hosted solution came out on top. Network Homes went live in September 2020.

IMMEDIATE IMPROVEMENT

Even in the testing phase, users could feel the difference. The system is now running 22% faster than before. This includes for high-volume tasks like raising a works order (45% faster) and processing an invoice (38% faster).

Christo is also clear they made the right choice on cost: “We’ll save more than £70k over five years just in hardware. And that’s without the cost of installing, configuring and integrating a server. Even if we’d gone with another cloud provider, once you add in engineers and disaster recovery it was looking like £300k more expensive.”

Christo’s team is now checking they’re using the system to the best of its ability. Once that’s finished, the next step is to take advantage of newer features, like support for GDPR.