Christadelphian Care Homes (CCH) is a faith-based charity organisation that has over 70 years of experience providing residential care primarily for members of the Christadelphian religion. This can include providing financial support to Christadelphians who would not be able to afford care fees.
The care organisation is motivated by delivering the best care possible to its residents. It relies on charity donations and has a strong community support system. CCH offers various kinds of care across nine locations here in the UK, ranging from full nursing care to assisted living apartments.
The Challenge
Christadelphian Care Homes was hosting old servers that were outdated and unreliable, causing disruptions, and frustration. There was a huge risk of the servers failing meaning staff wouldn’t be able to access business critical applications.
The servers were in a physical building and accessed remotely through a complex network setup. CCH had three physical servers and eleven virtual servers, all sitting on those three physical servers. Recent hardware failures highlighted the need for a more modern solution. Additionally, there were concerns about the potential unreliability of the old servers and the difficulties in dealing with any fallout from potential server failures.
Additionally, CCH was using a slow Remote Desktop Services (RDS) server, which compounded the issues. The RDS server's sluggish performance made remote access cumbersome and inefficient, further frustrating staff and hindering productivity.
To avoid any further disruption to business, CCH decided to invest in its technologies and seek a more modern, secure, and flexible IT foundation to support its digital transformation goals.
The Solution
TSG and Christadelphian Care Homes collaborated to identify the most suitable solution that would remedy the issues achieve digital transformation goals. The project involved three physical and eleven virtual servers, including mailbox accounts, folders, files, and various applications like CMS.
The servers were migrated to Microsoft Azure, a secure and reliable cloud platform. This migration eliminated the need for a remote access system and replaced it with Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). The transition to AVD was seamless, with minimal disruption and unforeseen issues, providing CCH with a robust and modern IT foundation.
On top of the migration, TSG handled project management, consultancy services, and development resources.
The Results
Improved productivity: The organisation experiences improved productivity. Employees now have faster and more reliable access to the business’s applications. This productivity is expected to grow further in the next stage of moving to SharePoint.
Enhance security: Moving to the cloud with AVD has allowed for enhanced data security.
Increased scalability: Azure allows CCH the option to expand or reduce their IT resources to accommodate future business need.
Seamless integration: Azure Virtual Desktop allowed for seamless integration with both Microsoft 365 applications and CCH's internal business applications.
Increased confidence: The CCH team can carry out their everyday tasks with confidence in the reliability of the new IT systems. There is no longer any worry of a mass failure of on-site servers.
What’s Next?
CCH is planning to enhance its IT infrastructure further by moving its current file structure to SharePoint to improve productivity further. Before this happens, the CCH team will explore all existing files to ensure only necessary data is migrated to SharePoint.
Chris Watkins – IT Lead