Node4's virtual data centre delivers for Together for Mental Wellbeing

Together For Mental Wellbeing is the UK’s oldest mental health charity. It operates services across England that are funded by organisations like the NHS or local authorities to support people on their journey toward better mental wellbeing and independent lives. The charity’s services include community support, supported housing and 24-hour residential accommodation, advocacy, and assistance for those experiencing mental distress in criminal justice settings such as courts and on probation.

The Challenge

The server room, which sits at the heart of Together for Mental Wellbeing’s IT estate, was little more than a converted space in one of the charity’s accommodation centres. These servers hosted the organisation’s Virtual Machines (VMs), which, in turn, supported its case management system and associated service user data — making them integral to daily operations and service provision.

“The time came for us to find somewhere new for our servers,” says Hiten Patel, Head of IT at Together for Mental Wellbeing. “There was a major construction and renovation project planned in the building, and we had been given a strict moving-out date. By the time we’d done due diligence and selected Node4 for the project, we had around a month and a half to rehouse our servers. The pressure was on!”

The Solution

Node4 provided Together for Mental Wellbeing with a Virtual Data Centre (VDC) solution, which includes automated backup, recovery and business continuity components. This ensures the charity can now bring its services quickly back online in the event of any unplanned outages. It also boosts confidence across the organisation that critical mental health support services can be delivered as planned no matter what IT-related incidents might occur.

Working with Hiten Patel and his team, Node4 completed the VDC migration within the allotted six-week timeframe, transferring the charity’s virtual infrastructure (e.g. user identity management, networking services and applications/data) from the original server room to new high-performance physical servers hosted in one of Node4’s data centres.

The new servers are load-balanced to ensure optimum performance even during peak usage — with immediately noticeable improvements for remote and hybrid workers. In addition, the entire environment is protected by two fully customisable, enterprise-grade firewalls — giving the charity a much-needed IT security enhancement.

“Node4’s VDC solution has made our lives so much easier,” says Hiten Patel. “These days, we access our IT infrastructure remotely via an easy-to-use portal. We can provision new VMs, change configurations, reboot servers and perform restores from backups — it’s a total game-changer. Best of all, the mundane, time-intensive patch management, firmware updates and other infrastructure-related admin is now handled by Node4 as part of their managed service offering.”

The Results

Working closely with the NHS and other funding organisations means Together for Mental Wellbeing has to pass regular strict IT audits. Today, this is much easier for the charity as Node4’s data centres are all ISO 27001 accredited, and access to the organisation’s management portal is protected by multi-factor authentication.

The data is also protected by strong physical security measures at Node4’s data centre sites. This includes perimeter fencing, strict access policies, and a 24/7 onsite presence. Hiten Patel notes that, as a result, completing the audit is much easier these days: “Node4’s security posture is instrumental in enabling us to deliver a secure IT infrastructure that protects our highly sensitive data. Sharing Node4’s security credentials with the NHS especially provides greater transparency and demonstrates we take our own IT security incredibly seriously.”

“The security, resilience and on-site support really couldn’t be more different from our original server room,” he recalls. “One incident, in particular, brought this home to me. Back in the day, someone accidentally turned off the master switches for the air conditioning units that cooled our server room. These were located in an easily accessible, non-secured area of our building. Fortunately, the server room’s temperature sensors kicked in. We alerted the site manager, who switched them back on as we quickly raced across town to attend to the situation. The crisis was averted, but it could have been a truly catastrophic incident.”

Hiten Patel concludes: “If you’d asked me how I felt before the migration, I’d probably have told you I was terrified. But having Node4 in my corner gave me huge confidence. Looking back, it’s probably one of the smoothest migrations I’ve done — despite it being one of the more complex and the fastest. Node4’s team delivered value over and above, moving us to a new managed environment. As such, I believe we have discovered a real IT partner who genuinely wants to help us get the best from our environment, expand our IT knowledge and help us plan the next stage in our digital transformation.”