Beyond Housing: unified & agile infrastructure

Background

Established in 2018, Beyond Housing is one of the largest registered housing providers in the North-East and North Yorkshire. Beyond Housing has regional offices in Redcar and Scarborough. They manage over 15,000 homes and provide services to over 30,000 customers in the North-East and North Yorkshire. The organisation dedicates itself to supporting its communities and region to thrive.

Beyond Housing helps communities thrive by offering great homes and helpful services from caring staff. This leads to better neighbourhoods that will continue to grow and succeed in the long run.

What needed to change?

Following the merger that created Beyond Housing the organisation needed to move to one unified system
‘Legacy’ systems needed replacing with more up-to-date, tailored infrastructure for the business
The team at Beyond Housing wanted to implement an agile working platform to enable them to work remotely
Less reliance on the in-house IT team for day-to-day support of the business

How trustack helped

Trustack designed and implemented a three-step project to create a unified, agile infrastructure for Beyond Housing. This included:

STEP 1

A core infrastructure refresh at head office

STEP 2

The IT team rolled out VMware Horizon from partial to full use across the estate. Beyond housing wanted to deliver VDI for easy access, remote and agile working.
Through their partnership with VMware Trustack added value with a proof of concept.
VMware DEM to provide a consistent user experience in a non-persistent desktop environment.
VMware App Volumes streams applications to desktops as users log in, delivering only the needed applications and controlling licensing.
VMware Unified Access Gateway to facilitate secure, authenticated connections from outside the local network.

STEP 3

Dell and the business worked together to give test laptops to important people. They gave feedback on the laptops to the business after testing, Beyond housing bought 400 laptops to enable remote working for all of its colleagues.
Trustack helped Beyond Housing transition to Office 365, allowing the business to easily adjust the number of users as needed.
Trustack continues to provide wraparound Managed Services support for their new infrastructure.

Testimonial

We appreciated Trustack’s help in figuring out our needs, testing devices, and demonstrating the technology to our coworkers. This approach encouraged by-in from collegues and supported a collaborative approach to enhancing our technology offer. The Trustack team invited important people to our meetings to help us choose the right equipment to our business needs. Their experience and reference from other similiar organisations was invaluable.

– Maeve Collier, Director of ICT & Change Beyond Housing