Karbon Homes build, manage and look after affordable homes for people across the North. It gives them the strong foundations they need to crack on with life. Since 2017, Karbon Homes has focused on delivering on three strategic aims – to provide as many good quality homes as it can, to deliver excellent service to customers and to shape strong, sustainable places for communities.
The Karbon Homes footprint covers the North East of England and Yorkshire, with almost 30,000 homes across diverse communities, all facing different opportunities and challenges. Karbon Homes always make the effort to understand its customers. Some customers just need an affordable home, or a way onto the property ladder. Others might need more – financial advice, community services, sheltered accommodation or even training that can lead to a new job.
Whatever people need to feel more secure, confident and happy with where they’re at, Karbon Homes work its heart out to provide it.
With 6 sites across the North East, colleagues returning to office locations required consistent, fast and secure access to cloud services.
TruStack have worked with Karbon Homes for over 9 years so have a strong understanding of Karbon Homes’ existing IT systems. Being a Cisco Meraki-first Partner, TruStack were perfectly placed to help Karbon Homes prepare their remote offices for investigations and migration to the cloud.
Combining Meraki’s SD-WAN technology with recently provisioned gigabit internet circuits, TruStack’s Cisco specialists were able to ensure the network expansion and changes made to Karbon Homes’ infrastructure was seamless and supported their existing IT set-up.
Our Cisco specialists had a detailed understanding of Karbon Homes’ business and its operational requirements, so therefore recommended the protection offered by Cisco Meraki appliances and Cisco Umbrella.
“One key challenge that the Meraki stack overcomes well is the patch management process, as updates were easily managed and completed, with little to no downtime to the sites served by the equipment being upgraded.”
Cisco Meraki
Karbon Homes worked with Cisco Meraki products for several years, starting with wireless access points then introducing the SD-WAN solution as a replacement for a costly 3rd party managed MPLS solution.
Using some smaller sites as proof-of-concept in 2019, the full solution was implemented through late 2020 and early 2021.
The out-of-the-box experience Cisco Meraki offered, made installation and maintenance hassle free, the dashboard gave instant visibility of network availability and with critical alert notifications, the right people were made aware of issues at remote sites, in real time.
The successful deployment of Cisco solutions across Karbon Homes’ network gave users greater agility, with faster and secure access to on-premise and cloud resources made available between sites.
Network management and visability was also simplied with Cisco Meraki and gave greater insight into the health of their network.
Karbon Homes and Trustack’s longstanding relationship helped both parties have the confidence that the right solutions for the business were being implemented.
Most sites were switched over to the new system in hours, with short maintenance windows agreed with key figures within Karbon Homes prior to deployment.
The staged deployments were all completed successfully, with no issues reported as a result of Trustack’s preplanning with Karbon Homes.
The SD-WAN install gave Karbon Homes a lot more insight into the existing Meraki network. The highly available MX pairs included in the designs at larger sites, combined with resilient fibre connections gave greater confidence that locations would be available whenever colleagues need them.
The ease of deployment meant Karbon Homes was able to extend its area-wide network to Cumbria, ensuring that employees working on projects at that site had easy, immediate and secure access to work-critical resources.
Trustack’s understanding of Karbon Homes’ estate prior to the SD-WAN deployment meant that the correct considerations were able to be made, ensuring minimal disruption to the business.
“TruStack worked with Karbon Homes from start to finish on the project, ensuring that requirements were identified and met throughout. Our assigned consultant worked closely with us to ensure the switchover from our existing solutions were completed, ensuring minimal downtime and reliable delivery. Overall, we’ve had a great experience working on this project with TruStack; from the design stage, right through to delivery and handover.”
ICT Technical Services Team, Karbon Homes