One Manchester: provider of housing and community services — approximately 12,000 homes in central, south, and east Manchester.
Formed in April 2015 from a historic merger between two of Manchester’s largest housing associations – City South and Eastlands Homes – they currently own and manage more than 12,000 homes in central, south and east Manchester. Their aim is to provide good quality homes that are safe, secure, warm and affordable.
THE CHALLENGE.
As a longstanding customer, Central has provided IT support for the team at One Manchester for a decade. And with an enhanced understanding of the business’s infrastructure, having already supported the company through a merger process between two of Central’s clients, the team was keen to be in the running when a new brief emerged.
With the joining of two social housing providers, the company recognised an overspend on a mix of connectivity solutions. Therefore, having sought recommendations from an external consultant, One Manchester was eager to amalgamate its provision — reducing network complexity and cost in the process. an Duncalf, operations team lead at One Manchester, comments:
“We’ve worked alongside the team at Central for more than a decade, so we trust them implicitly. They know our systems inside out and, as a result, their advice and recommendations during the tender process were spot on. They were a natural choice when it came to selecting a provider to overhaul our connectivity solutions, and their work continues to be highly regarded.”
THE SOLUTION.
Central’s proposed solution was to install Cisco Meraki as a means to simplify the network and regain control.
With reducing costs and complexity of the organisation’s connectivity solutions a priority, Central replaced the entire existing multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network and migrated the company’s infrastructure across to a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).
In addition to providing the initial hardware recommendations and installation, the team required connectivity at each of its 43 sites. With no one-size-fits-all solution, the technology is subject to continuous monitoring and management from the team at Central — which runs in tandem with the first, second, and third-line support services.
THE OUTCOME.
Despite a shortage of equipment due to the pandemic, and factoring in market testing, tendering and a major refurbishment works — the majority of the project is now live. The cost savings achieved by the exercise are estimated to be in the region of £100k.
With an SD-WAN in place, the team can make changes and decisions over the network without being governed by a route/switch processor (RSP). Instead, the organisation has increased flexibility with the added benefit of reduced overheads.
The switch has enabled the migration of One Manchester’s infrastructure to public cloud, with all systems in Microsoft Azure and accessible through Cisco Meraki.
Central is now able to effectively prioritise different kinds of traffic on behalf of One Manchester, adding internet lines and quickly increasing speeds with ease — without the need to consult an internet service provider.
