Housing and Construction

Our knowledge of housing associations doesn’t just stem from implementing projects. Our senior Citrix Consultant was previously employed by a Housing Association before he joined Axess Systems. This means we have real-life day-to-day experience of working in this sector.

Housing Association Testimonial
Axess Systems has worked with a number of Housing Associations throughout the UK, but our best testimonial is with Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA)

Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA) is one of the largest locally-based housing groups in the East Midlands, managing over 9,200 homes, housing more than 20,000 tenants, and providing provide care and support services to over 2000 service users.

Already supporting over 1,100 members of staff, NCHA are currently undertaking substantial and ongoing growth plans. By the end of 2022 they will have developed an additional 1,500 new homes, bringing the total number of homes managed to in excess of 10,500, and will have provided over 800,000 hours of sustainable care and support to the most vulnerable people in society.

The main challenge with the existing ICT infrastructure was the age of the technology being used, and the fact it was nearing capacity. Running at this level of density and age meant reliability issues were a cause for concern.

In addition, the back-up window was expanding and running into the operational window and had started to impact on performance and user experience.

Power capacity was an added complication. Adding additional hardware to their on-premise data centre would have meant installing an on-site generator to manage supply.

Therefore, NCHA set out to upgrade their private cloud using Citrix and scale out to a secondary co-located site for disaster recovery purposes. By implementing this ICT infrastructure, it would:

 Remove any inherent risk from the existing ICT Systems
 Improve security and compliance
 Provide the opportunity to innovate
 Improve efficiency and productivity
 Improve the level of customer service to the members of staff
 Future Proof the IT Systems
 Provide NCHA with predictable costs for the expansion

Following a competitive tendering exercise, NCHA worked with Axess Systems and set about the challenge of designing and implementing a Citrix solution to assist with the application delivery of their private cloud, storage and co-location of their infrastructure for back-up and disaster recovery.

Since implementing the Citrix, solution NCHA are already seeing the benefits. These are:

Removal of risks from the previous ICT Systems
By applying a new Hybrid Cloud solution NCHA have removed the risk of a severe service interruption.

Improving efficiency and productivity
One of the main benefits the ICT systems now have over the previous systems is the aid to improving efficiency and productivity.

Gaining visibility of performance and utilisation analytics data means NCHA are able to effectively predict growth patterns, network loads, regular trends and avoid any unscheduled downtime which means the systems can deliver better availability and more productivity.

Predictable Costs
The new solution provides NCHA with a predictable cost base. This helps reduce business risk and any unforeseen expense through growing or scaling the systems.

Future proofing the business
The new systems are designed to be scalable and meet the future needs of NCHA in a predictable fashion, without the need for a re-design or re-engineering.

Improving the level of service to members of staff
The new ICT Systems enable the IT team to provide a more comprehensive level of service to their users. Quicker problem resolution will be achieved with more advanced reporting tools, along with the ability to support more end-user devices.