Richard Humphreys |
Churchill Retirement Living, the provider of purpose-built retirement apartments within the UK, has worked with GCI-owned Blue Chip for more than ten years. From the company’s initial requirement for ad hoc IT support the relationship has continued to blossom, with the latest major projects including a full IT infrastructure refresh and cloud backup solution. As well as a longstanding partnership with Churchill, Blue Chip’s relationships with other retirement and care providers offer substantial insight into the sector’s unique requirements.
Churchill Retirement’s on-premise server infrastructure had reached the natural end of its lifecycle and needed replacing to ensure reliability and continuity. Blue Chip recommended a new virtual infrastructure, which would accommodate growth and new applications whilst keeping operational expenses to a minimum. This new infrastructure also supports a remote access solution, allowing site-based staff to access company files centrally no matter which location they are in.
With its backup solution also reaching capacity, Churchill Retirement sought an easy-to-manage, cost-effective replacement. While its existing tape backup solution had served the business well, backup was becoming increasingly laborious to control and expensive to run. Blue Chip recommended its SecureVault Cloud Backup service, powered by industry-leading Evault software from Carbonite, which offers a highly secure and scalable environment in which to back up business information. Data is backed up to Blue Chip’s private cloud platform, adhering to ISO9001 and ISO27001 standards, which is housed in Vodafone’s highly resilient and secure Tier 3 datacentre. Consolidating the physical servers within the datacentre offered an immediate reduction in capital expenditure, with highly-efficient de-duplication now in place to further control storage costs.
David Mears, ICT director at Churchill Retirement Living, said: “As an organisation that is looking to the future and plan to significantly expand the size of our business within the next five years, it is imperative that we invest in the right technology to accommodate this growth. Given our excellent, longstanding relationship, we trust in Blue Chip to provide a secure, scalable and reliable environment whilst enabling us to be cost efficient. We are safe in the knowledge that when the time comes to expand, we can look to Blue Chip’s expertise to support us.”