Jewish Care

Jewish Care saves £300K per annum with Selection Cloud

With over 1000 staff and 2,500 volunteers working across 70 centres in London, Jewish Care provides support for people in the Jewish community, particularly the elderly, disabled and those with mental health issues. When they started working with Selection, their IT infrastructure was suffering from under investment and had no Disaster Recovery (DR) in place, which was a major concern.

IT Manager, Brett Fellows, knew things had to change but he realised that the in-house IT staff would not be able to implement and support a modern, high performing system. Brett said: “Selection was chosen to update our infrastructure as they have a history of delivering innovative technology solutions and they are also commercially competitive.’

While they decided on a migration strategy for building a completely new platform, Jewish Care had to protect their existing aging infrastructure, and while they knew they wanted to centralise and move all their operations into the Cloud or Cloud-based applications they needed time to sort out the existing legacy of their server estate.

Using a combination of Falconstor for Migration and DR, along with VMware for all their servers, we gave them the space they needed to get a project plan in place for the migration, and the Cloud platform then performed a great deal of the migration work for them by replicating the Data offsite and allowing us to pick and choose the servers to be migrated or cutover onto the new platform in a more leisurely pace, all the while with the assurance that all elements were protected by a DR solution that would mitigate the risks during the cutover period.

Now that the migration is complete and Jewish Care’s IT infrastructure has been brought up-to-date, Head of IT, Ross Mullenger, said: “We are saving money and have been freed up to concentrate on the more strategic issues that add value to the business.” The cost savings have been considerable, as the Selection Cloud solutions require no up-front capital investment, which Ross said would have been around £300,000 if they had replaced the servers in-house.

As Selection Cloud’s solution includes both hosting and Disaster Recovery, Jewish Care has no need to fund a separate DR solution, which saves around £200,000 per annum. Additionally, Jewish Care’s partnership with Selection has removed the need for in-house, third-line engineering support, and this will save a further £100,000 per annum. The removal of 70 physical servers also means that the drop in their energy costs and carbon footprint has been significant.

It’s not just the cost-effectiveness of the solution that has impressed either. The level of service that Selection delivers is excellent and Brett explained: ‘Our server support SLA is 100%, something I have never experienced before, and the level of service we get from the support team and the account management team is excellent.’ As an example he highlighted the fact that the team responded immediately to support for the DR implementation before a signed contract was even in place.

On the basis of this project, which has been up and running for 18 months now with no unresolved issues or any serious problems, Ross concluded: ‘I would be more than happy to strongly recommend Selection and advise other companies to give them serious consideration for their IT management.’