St Loyes Foundation

St Loye’s Foundation

Customer Background
The aim of St Loye’s Foundation is to be the preferred choice for people seeking help to realise their potential for financial independence through work. They offer individually tailored training and personal development programmes to meet their clients’ needs and they take pride in their unique ability to support the whole person on their journey to sustainable, independent working and social inclusion. With 70 years of experience in helping people, they understand the underlying and often complex problems that disability and long term ill health can bring.

The Challenge
St Loye’s Foundation were looking to move out of their existing building into Exeter city centre, whilst at the same time they wanted to upgrade their network infrastructure, due to its limitations. This included:

• Servers with no redundancy in the form of RAID arrays.
• No redundant power supplies or any kind of failover capacity should a server fail.
• No backup in place for company data or emails.
• No available system for people to access the internet for personal use.
• The PBX phone system was also costly and lacking in the features that are available in newer phone systems.

Due to the nature of the organisation, St Loye’s foundation were looking to appoint a technical support company to provide:

• Regular server and network maintenance.
• Fast response and efficient technical support to both staff and trainee systems.
• Liaise with line managers regarding any new requirements for security or otherwise.
• Provision of new servers to replace the existing ones.
• Workstations that could run demanding CAD applications for training.
• New phone system to replace the existing one.
• Setup of policies to control user's access to both computer functions and shared sensitive data.
• Future sites based around the country to have secure access to data in the main office.
• Traceability of all I.T hardware belonging to the foundation as well as being able to lookup the status of the equipment for warranty checking and other purposes.

A recent requirement from Ofsted was that students and teachers should have the ability to contact each other via emails and that students have internet access. Naturally, they would need to restrict access to unsuitable websites and prevent the downloading of any unsuitable content. A branch office would soon be opening in Cardiff consisting of only a couple of members of staff, who would require access to their emails, shared company data as well as their own user data.

Another project that was starting was the acquisition of accommodation to house up to 40 trainees. There would need to be network access throughout the building to allow user's to bring their own laptops or computers and connect to the internet. Content filtering would be required again as the internet connection would belong to the foundation and therefore liable for any content downloaded.

The last major project in line was an additional site office to be opened in Exeter. The main purpose of this site was to provide a service for people seeking jobs enabling them to;

• Connect to the internet and search for jobs.
• Print out documents regarding them.
• Provide them with telephones to contact the potential employer.

Given that there would be at least 3 members of St Loye’s staff working there, requiring access to their emails, documents and other internet services. A secure system would need to be devised for them to access their required services.

The Solution
St Loye's Foundation contracted AME Solutions to be their outsourced IT team, which started with addressing the requirements at their Topsham road site, before the relocation took place. AME installed an Internet Café allowing users internet access, which required restricting access to content that was deemed unnecessary or unsuitable. AME’s eGuard content filtering system was installed to restrict access.

A backup system was also installed to allow them to backup their data on their current infrastructure St Loye’s signed up to AME’s Silver Support contract with some extras specific to their requirements. They have a
pre-arranged weekly site visit for server maintenance, monitoring and for non-urgent issues which staff would like investigated.

AME Solutions designed and implemented a completely new network infrastructure to tie in with the office move to Brittany House, as well as project managing the entire ICT relocation. Five new purpose built servers with full redundancy in both RAID arrays and power supplies were installed, along with refreshing over 100 existing PC’s so they were clean and ready to use in the new office. A new server was setup as a Remote Desktop Server to allow remote users secure access to their own personal desktop, documents and emails from any internet connected location. A security policy was implemented alongside the server
installation which granted users access to shared data based on group membership. This ensures that secure and confidential data is kept safe and can only be accessed by those that are authorised too.

To provide CAD training, 20 workstations specifically built for Computer Aided Design were installed onto the new network. A Cisco VOIP phone system was installed as an alternative to the PBX system, to reduce long term costs, provide a better quality of service and simplify the management of internal calls for the end users.

With the new office coming online in Cardiff, AME provided the internet connection, computers and configuration to allow these users remote access back to Brittany house. This solution allowed them to securely access the data they require, check their emails and access applications allowing them to not only work from their office, but also work from home or anywhere else should they require it. With the on-going expansion and the acquisition of a building to be used as accommodation, we installed 2 wireless networks. One for use by the onsite staff, the other for residents to connect their computers to the internet.

St Loyes Foundation continuing expansion led to the addition of another office building in Exeter with the purpose of providing job seekers with access to the internet and the ability to contact employers. AME provided and configured the telephones and internet services for this new site, along with new computers enabling them to access the network at Brittany house.

The Benefits
Over the past 2 years, our solution has provided the St Loye’s Foundation with a completely new and optimally configured network infrastructure to not only meet the existing requirements that were set at the time, but also meeting the future requirements that were taken into account on the original install. By moving to a VOIP phone system, long term costs have been reduced. There is now redundancy in the hardware reducing downtime and all users can work from anywhere provided they have a computer and internet connection to hand.