Case Studies:

Residential Care Home

• BACKGROUND

This company specialises in promoting a better quality of life for individuals with learning disabilities and/or mental health problems. With their head office based in Colwyn Bay they manage 8 residential homes along the North Wales coast from Llandudno up to Anglesey.

• CUSTOMER NEED

As a rapidly expanding business the company had a need to move to a larger premises from which to grow. With this also came the need to ensure that the company's existing IT infrastructure would cope with the increasing demands of the company's expansion. Coupled with this was a requirement for the houses to be able to gain access to shared data on the remote server and for the house managers with laptops to be able to gain access to the server while roaming.

Additional requirements were for the directors to have remote access from both home and abroad and of key importance was a communal office diary and a the strict implementation of a robust data security policy.

Immediate response to system failures on all equipment at all premises was also required.

• CATalyst SOLUTION

Following a comprehensive site survey of the new offices CATalyst Systems commenced installation of all new cabling & wireless topologies at all premises. All of the these we returned to a patch panels in secure data cabinets which also housed the intelligent, managed switches & routers. We installed a 2003 Small Business Server and configured Exchange to act as both a Pop3 & Exchange mail server. With Exchange comes OWA (Outlook Web Access) allowing the users to read their e-mail over the web. Broadband was installed at the head office and all the homes over which we created multiple VPN connections enabling all the houses to gain secure access to very sensitive data remotely.

Anti-spyware, anti-spam & anti-virus software was installed along with a robust backup regime and disaster recovery policy.

• RESULTS & BENEFITS

A massive increase in business functionality & communication

Reduced operational costs due to the benefits of broadband allowing our support centre to gain immediate access to the clients thus increasing productivity.