Audley Retirement makes the move into the Cloud

Audley Retirement builds and manages the UK’s first set of luxury retirement villages, with 11 sites currently in the UK. Something different from care homes, Audley’s villages offer independence in beautiful and secure locations. Customers own their own high quality home, cottage or apartment, with additional services to rival any boutique hotel including health and wellbeing clubs, bars and bistros.

Audley prides itself on its innovative way of thinking, something that fits well with Fifosys’ outlook on IT. In 2007 Audley selected Fifosys to initially set up a server infrastructure at its head office in Staines to provide 40 people with access to emails, files, and company applications. Since then, Audley has moved its IT infrastructure into Fifosys’ cloud. As well as Audley’s head office, Fifosys is also migrating each village’s IT infrastructure to the cloud. Seven out of eleven sites have currently been migrated, with the other four in planning.

The Service
By 2011, the initial IT infrastructure that Fifosys had implemented for Audley Retirement had expanded; from the single site in Staines, Fifosys’ infrastructure was supporting six locations and over 180 users across the UK. Whilst highly reliable, Fifosys recognised that the solution architecture was no longer viable for the multi-location organisation and proposed a migration to a fully hosted cloud environment, taking ease of administration, support and long term manageable investment as contributing factors.

The proposal was designed to align the long term IT strategy with Audley’s business strategy, reducing its risk exposure and increasing administrative ease.

Fifosys migrated Audley’s business systems to its cloud environment. The physical equipment and Audley data is stored in a data centre facility which is not only more secure and requires less management, but is lower cost to maintain than an on-premise solution.

Fifosys has also implemented a Citrix portal which allows Audley to access its IT infrastructure from anywhere with an internet connection; providing access to all the business information at any time or place.

Spokesperson, Audley Retirement, comments, “Fifosys helped us develop a new IT environment that truly fits with our wider business objectives. They took the time to not only understand the key business drivers but also outlined all the data and the costs associated with different options, which helped us make the right decision to move into their cloud.”

The Benefits
Moving to the cloud has enabled Audley to not only improve IT efficiency but also save a significant amount of money in IT costs. For example, the cost of upgrading desktops in the cloud environment is up to 60% cheaper per unit than the previous IT infrastructure. The cloud environment is also saving costs when moving offices and expanding the business, as all data and applications needed can be accessed via the Citrix portal at any location. In addition, Audley now enjoys an impressive 99.99% uptime, significantly increasing operational efficiency.

This centralised management is also a huge benefit to the day-to-day operations of Audley’s retirement villages. Site managers can now move from village to village with access to the all the documents they need. Sites can also be managed and dealt with on a daily basis from one single centralised location which is providing additional time and cost savings – and increasing the overall control that Audley has over the business operations.

Paul Morgan, Operations Director, Audley Retirement, comments, “Fifosys’ cloud infrastructure has been a huge benefit to us and has provided us with the ability to expand our IT infrastructure to underpin our journey of growth.”