MHS Homes

For over 25 years MHS Homes has been helping people, often those on low incomes, to rent or part-buy a place to live. With a portfolio of 10,000 properties and garages across Kent, MHS is the largest independent social landlord in the UK. In addition to the large property portfolio, MHS provides additional supported living services for over 60s, schemes to support young people and sheltered accommodation for people over 50.

With a long-term strategic commitment to ending the housing crisis in north Kent, delivering effective, efficient and user-friendly services for residents was critical to success as it would make it possible to better support those clients without internet access while reducing the overall administrative burden of manual services. This major project led to a significant increase in the organization’s overall reliance on IT infrastructure, in addition to the day-to-day operations of the business.

With the organization relying on IT infrastructure for all its operational activities it was essential that systems were robust and reliable. To manage the organizations IT, MHS employ a team of 10 staff working across three functional areas: Technical services, applications management and database management and reporting. In terms of hardware, MHS has 90 virtual servers and around 150 office based thin clients.  There are also Laptops, tablets and mobile phones for staff, together with phone systems and then associated software solutions, all supported with Cisco networking solutions, Dell servers, a VMWare environment where most of the servers operate and a Cisco Phone System. Citrix is used to deliver the majority of desktop applications as a thin client solution. There is only one physical server.

The previous backup and disaster recovery solution used by MHS was a perfectly serviceable cloud-based solution. Having been in place for five years, procurement requirements dictated that it was time to go back out to the market to assess what was available. Keen to look for something new, the team sought advice and recommendations from fellow members of the Southern IT Forum, primarily representing IT services functions across a group of housing associations in the south.

Recommendations Speak Volumes for The Quality of Our Products

Assured Data Protection’s Rubrik product was one of the solutions recommended by other members, and they also spoke highly of the support that was also provided by the team at ADP. ADP were asked to participate in the tendering process and, following a full evaluation of submissions and a demonstration, Rubrik was chosen as the preferred option. The team at MHS were impressed with the comprehensive support offered by ADP, and the fact that Rubrik offered a single solution. This was a key issue in the tender requirements. Competitive pricing helped ensure that ADP scored well across the full tender assessment.

Infrastructure Support Manager, Dave, was really pleased with the new solution: “It’s just better in every single way. Installation was quick and easy. You point to your environment and Rubrik just backs up the data. That sums up the whole experience. It’s just really easy”.

Amanda Hodge, IT Manager at MHS was equally pleased with the implementation of Rubrik, and talks enthusiastically about the ongoing support offered by our team: “It’s also not just the solution but the service as well. We’ve had a continuous line to whoever we needed, whether it be the technical side or the account management side. We’ve always had someone that we can come to very quickly. When we were looking to move to Office 365 ADP were able to offer a great solution which was very reasonably priced compared to other solutions we looked at”.

Future Plans

Amanda said:

“MHS really value the relationship with the ADP team and are able to offer real reassurance to the wider MHS team around data recovery and business continuity. Rubrik offers more than just the standard backup and restore features and in the first disaster recovery test that was carried out the whole system worked seamlessly. Within a couple of hours, all the servers were working again, and the Citrix environment was also back online within 2 hours – something the previous provider was unable to achieve after 2-days work!

It’s not necessarily looking for the cheapest all the time, but definitely the one that gives you the absolute best value for money and complete peace of mind. These guys have done it time and time again”.

MHS are really keen to continue using Rubrik and are now looking at a procurement framework agreement. This will ensure that they can continue to use Rubrik and can work with the ADP team to further enhance the benefits of Rubrik.