Your Housing Group moves its largest network to MDNX

Your Housing Group was formed in April 2012 following the merger of Harvest Housing Group and Arena Housing Group. Your Housing Group has over 32,000 homes across the North West, Yorkshire and Staffordshire. As well as a wide range of homes for social and affordable rent, it also provides homes for sale and shared ownership as well as Extra Care Housing for the over 55s and sheltered and supported accommodation for older people and young adults. The newly created Group has a large project underway to consolidate the IT infrastructures that exist, but there was an immediate requirement to upgrade the Wide Area Network (WAN) for the Harvest Housing element of the Group to accommodate growth in staff numbers and IT infrastructure complexity and increasing bandwidth requirements.

The WAN consists of 60 sites that are a mixture of data centres, corporate offices, neighbourhood offices, small office locations and homeworkers, all in the North West. It was particularly important for Your Housing Group that the contract and solution design was flexible enough to accommodate their changing requirements as they progressed through their IT consolidation project as well as being able to support new applications such as VOIP.
Following the merger, Your Housing Group needed a new network that could support the increasingly complex IT systems used by the 1200 employees and that during this important time of transition would provide a scalable, resilient and innovative solution.

“We wanted a network that was agile and was able to provide us with scalability and resiliency to support our new initiatives,” says Andrew Giles, Director ICT at Your Housing Group. “We felt that MDNX was able to deliver to our requirements, but also found that there was a cultural fit in the way it worked. We have over 60 sites and often there are moves within the network from site to site, so we needed a provider that was capable of handling that requirement.”

Andrew added, “MDNX planned and successfully completed the transition of the Your Housing contact centre to the new network recently. We were impressed at how smoothly it went.”

MDNX is integrating connectivity from TalkTalk Business, BT, Virgin Media and Exponential-e, through its core integration network to create a solution that is able to scale as new technology emerges, without Your Housing Group having to be tied down to a single provider. “By utilising the best possible service from all the UK’s telecoms providers we are able to ensure that Your Housing Group enjoys the best network performance at the best price point,” says MDNX, COO, Wayne Churchill. “As technology evolves rapidly, companies such as Your Housing Group should not be tied to long term circuit or connectivity contracts that restrict them from taking advantage of the economic and performance improvements brought about by such change.”